a robust approach based on weibull distribution for clustering gene expression data一个健壮的方法基于威布尔分布的聚类基因表达数据.pdfVIP

Wang et al. Algorithms for Molecular Biology 2011, 6:14 /content/6/1/14 RESEARCH Open Access A robust approach based on Weibull distribution for clustering gene expression data 1,2† 1† 1* 1 2 2 Huakun Wang , Zhenzhen Wang , Xia Li , Binsheng Gong , Lixin Feng and Ying Zhou Abstract Background: Clustering is a widely used technique for analysis of gene expression data. Most clustering methods group genes based on the distances, while few methods group genes according to the similarities of the distributions of the gene expression levels. Furthermore, as the biological annotation resources accumulated, an increasing number of genes have been annotated into functional categories. As a result, evaluating the performance of clustering methods in terms of the functional consistency of the resulting clusters is of great interest. Results: In this paper, we proposed the WDCM (Weibull Distribution-based Clustering Method), a robust approach for clustering gene expression data, in which the gene expressions of individual genes are considered as the random variables following unique Weibull distributions. Our WDCM is based on the concept that the genes with similar expression profiles have similar distribution parameters, and thus the genes are clustered via the Weibull distribution parameters. We used the WDCM to cluster three cancer gene expression data sets from the lung cancer, B-cell follicular lymphoma and bladder carcinoma and obtained well-clustered results. We compared the performance of WDCM with k-means and Self Organizing Map (SOM) using functional annotation information given by the Gene Ontology (GO). The results showed that the functional annotation ratios of WDCM are higher