A multi-step approach to time series analysis and gene expression clustering

Motivation: The huge growth in gene expression data calls for the implementation of automatic tools for data processing and interpretation. Results: We present a new and comprehensive machine learning data mining framework consisting in a non-linear PCA neural network for feature extraction, and probabilistic principal surfaces combined with an agglomerative approach based on Negentropy aimed at clustering gene microarray data. The method, which provides a user-friendly visualization interface, can work on noisy data with missing points and represents an automatic procedure to get, with no a priori assumptions, the number of clusters present in the data. Cell-cycle dataset and a detailed analysis confirm the biological nature of the most significant clusters. Availability: The software described here is a subpackage part of the ASTRONEURAL package and is available upon request from the corresponding author. Contact: robtag@unisa.it Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.