Discriminative Pattern Discovery On Biological Networks

This work provides a review of biological networks as a model for analysis, presenting and discussing a number of illuminating analyses. Biological networks are an effective model for providing insights about biological mechanisms. Networks with different characteristics are employed for representing different scenarios. This powerful model allows analysts to perform many kinds of analyses which can be mined to provide interesting information about underlying biological behaviors. The text also covers techniques for discovering exceptional patterns, such as a pattern accounting for local similarities and also collaborative effects involving interactions between multiple actors (for example genes). Among these exceptional patterns, of particular interest are discriminative patterns, namely those which are able to discriminate between two input populations (for example healthy/unhealthy samples). In addition, the work includes a discussion on the most recent proposal on discovering discriminative patterns, in which there is a labeled network for each sample, resulting in a database of networks representing a sample set. This enables the analyst to achieve a much finer analysis than with traditional techniques, which are only able to consider an aggregated network of each population.

The computational methods of bioinformatics are being used more and more to process the large volume of current biological data. Promoting an understanding of the underlying biology that produces this data, Pattern Discovery in Bioinformatics: Theory and Algorithms provides the tools to study regularities in biological data. Taking a systema

This book presents pattern-based problem-solving methods for a variety of machine learning and data analysis problems. The methods are all based on techniques that exploit the power of group differences. They make use of group differences represented using emerging patterns (aka contrast patterns), which are patterns that match significantly different numbers of instances in different data groups. A large number of applications outside of the computing discipline are also included. Emerging patterns (EPs) are useful in many ways. EPs can be used as features, as simple classifiers, as subpopulation signatures/characterizations, and as triggering conditions for alerts. EPs can be used in gene ranking for complex diseases since they capture multi-factor interactions. The length of EPs can be used to detect anomalies, outliers, and novelties. Emerging/contrast pattern based methods for clustering analysis and outlier detection do not need distance metrics, avoiding pitfalls of the latter in exploratory analysis of high dimensional data. EP-based classifiers can achieve good accuracy even when the training datasets are tiny, making them useful for exploratory compound selection in drug design. EPs can serve as opportunities in opportunity-focused boosting and are useful for constructing powerful conditional ensembles. EP-based methods often produce interpretable models and results. In general, EPs are useful for classification, clustering, outlier detection, gene ranking for complex diseases, prediction model analysis and improvement, and so on. EPs are useful for many tasks because they represent group differences, which have extraordinary power. Moreover, EPs represent multi-factor interactions, whose effective handling is of vital importance and is a major challenge in many disciplines. Based on the results presented in this book, one can clearly say that patterns are useful, especially when they are linked to issues of interest. We believe that many effective ways to exploit group differences' power still remain to be discovered. Hopefully this book will inspire readers to discover such new ways, besides showing them existing ways, to solve various challenging problems.

This book provides the research directions for new or junior researchers who are going to use machine learning approaches for biological pattern discovery. The book was written based on the research experience of the author's several research projects in collaboration with biologists worldwide. The chapters are organised to address individual biological pattern discovery problems. For each subject, the research methodologies and the machine learning algorithms which can be employed are introduced and compared. Importantly, each chapter was written with the aim to help the readers to transfer their knowledge in theory to practical implementation smoothly. Therefore, the R programming environment was used for each subject in the chapters. The author hopes that this book can inspire new or junior researchers' interest in biological pattern discovery using machine learning algorithms.

"This book discusses the most significant research and latest practices in computational knowledge discovery approaches to bioinformatics in a cross-disciplinary manner that is useful for researchers, practitioners, academicians, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists involved in the many facets of bioinformatics"--

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, PAKDD 2007, held in Nanjing, China, May 2007. It covers new ideas, original research results and practical development experiences from all KDD-related areas including data mining, machine learning, data warehousing, data visualization, automatic scientific discovery, knowledge acquisition and knowledge-based systems.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First International on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, BICoB 2007, held in New Orleans, LA, USA, in April 2007. The 30 revised full papers presented together with 10 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 72 initial submissions. The papers address current research in the area of bioinformatics and computational biology fostering the advancement of computing techniques and their application to life sciences in topics such as genome analysis sequence analysis, phylogenetics, structural bioinformatics, analysis of high-throughput biological data, genetics and population analysis, as well as systems biology.