Classification performance assessment for imbalanced multiclass data.

The evaluation of diagnostic systems is pivotal for ensuring the deployment of high-quality solutions, especially given the pronounced context-sensitivity of certain systems, particularly in fields such as biomedicine. Of notable importance are predictive models where the target variable can encompass multiple values (multiclass), especially when these classes exhibit substantial frequency disparities (imbalance). In this study, we introduce the Imbalanced Multiclass Classification Performance (IMCP) curve, specifically designed for multiclass datasets (unlike the ROC curve), and characterized by its resilience to class distribution variations (in contrast to accuracy or F -score).

Advance Monitoring of COVID-19 Incidence Based on Taxi Mobility: The Infection Ratio Measure.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on various aspects of our lives, affecting personal, occupational, economic, and social spheres. Much has been learned since the early 2020s, which will be very useful when the next pandemic emerges. In general, mobility and virus spread are strongly related.

Pairwise gene GO-based measures for biclustering of high-dimensional expression data.

Background: Biclustering algorithms search for groups of genes that share the same behavior under a subset of samples in gene expression data. Nowadays, the biological knowledge available in public repositories can be used to drive these algorithms to find biclusters composed of groups of genes functionally coherent. On the other hand, a distance among genes can be defined according to their information stored in Gene Ontology (GO).

Soft Computing Methods for Disulfide Connectivity Prediction.

The problem of protein structure prediction (PSP) is one of the main challenges in structural bioinformatics. To tackle this problem, PSP can be divided into several subproblems. One of these subproblems is the prediction of disulfide bonds.

Building Transcriptional Association Networks in Cytoscape with RegNetC.

The Regression Network plugin for Cytoscape (RegNetC) implements the RegNet algorithm for the inference of transcriptional association network from gene expression profiles. This algorithm is a model tree-based method to detect the relationship between each gene and the remaining genes simultaneously instead of analyzing individually each pair of genes as correlation-based methods do. Model trees are a very useful technique to estimate the gene expression value by regression models and favours localized similarities over more global similarity, which is one of the major drawbacks of correlation-based methods.

Biclustering on expression data: A review.

Biclustering has become a popular technique for the study of gene expression data, especially for discovering functionally related gene sets under different subsets of experimental conditions. Most of biclustering approaches use a measure or cost function that determines the quality of biclusters. In such cases, the development of both a suitable heuristics and a good measure for guiding the search are essential for discovering interesting biclusters in an expression matrix.

Integrating biological knowledge based on functional annotations for biclustering of gene expression data.

Gene expression data analysis is based on the assumption that co-expressed genes imply co-regulated genes. This assumption is being reformulated because the co-expression of a group of genes may be the result of an independent activation with respect to the same experimental condition and not due to the same regulatory regime. For this reason, traditional techniques are recently being improved with the use of prior biological knowledge from open-access repositories together with gene expression data.

Configurable pattern-based evolutionary biclustering of gene expression data.

Background: Biclustering algorithms for microarray data aim at discovering functionally related gene sets under different subsets of experimental conditions. Due to the problem complexity and the characteristics of microarray datasets, heuristic searches are usually used instead of exhaustive algorithms. Also, the comparison among different techniques is still a challenge.

Contact map prediction using a large-scale ensemble of rule sets and the fusion of multiple predicted structural features.

Motivation: The prediction of a protein's contact map has become in recent years, a crucial stepping stone for the prediction of the complete 3D structure of a protein. In this article, we describe a methodology for this problem that was shown to be successful in CASP8 and CASP9. The methodology is based on (i) the fusion of the prediction of a variety of structural aspects of protein residues, (ii) an ensemble strategy used to facilitate the training process and (iii) a rule-based machine learning system from which we can extract human-readable explanations of the predictor and derive useful information about the contact map representation.

An effective measure for assessing the quality of biclusters.

Biclustering is becoming a popular technique for the study of gene expression data. This is mainly due to the capability of biclustering to address the data using various dimensions simultaneously, as opposed to clustering, which can use only one dimension at the time. Different heuristics have been proposed in order to discover interesting biclusters in data.

CarGene: characterisation of sets of genes based on metabolic pathways analysis.

The great amount of biological information provides scientists with an incomparable framework for testing the results of new algorithms. Several tools have been developed for analysing gene-enrichment and most of them are Gene Ontology-based tools. We developed a Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (Kegg)-based tool that provides a friendly graphical environment for analysing gene-enrichment.

Predicting protein distance maps according to physicochemical properties.

The prediction of protein structures is a current issue of great significance in structural bioinformatics. More specifically, the prediction of the tertiary structure of a protein consists in determining its three-dimensional conformation based solely on its amino acid sequence. This study proposes a method in which protein fragments are assembled according to their physicochemical similarities, using information extracted from known protein structures.

GO-based functional dissimilarity of gene sets.

Background: The Gene Ontology (GO) provides a controlled vocabulary for describing the functions of genes and can be used to evaluate the functional coherence of gene sets. Many functional coherence measures consider each pair of gene functions in a set and produce an output based on all pairwise distances. A single gene can encode multiple proteins that may differ in function.

A biclustering algorithm for extracting bit-patterns from binary datasets.

Motivation: Binary datasets represent a compact and simple way to store data about the relationships between a group of objects and their possible properties. In the last few years, different biclustering algorithms have been specially developed to be applied to binary datasets. Several approaches based on matrix factorization, suffix trees or divide-and-conquer techniques have been proposed to extract useful biclusters from binary data, and these approaches provide information about the distribution of patterns and intrinsic correlations.

Biclustering of gene expression data by correlation-based scatter search.

Background: The analysis of data generated by microarray technology is very useful to understand how the genetic information becomes functional gene products. Biclustering algorithms can determine a group of genes which are co-expressed under a set of experimental conditions. Recently, new biclustering methods based on metaheuristics have been proposed.

Prognostic transcriptional association networks: a new supervised approach based on regression trees.

Motivation: The application of information encoded in molecular networks for prognostic purposes is a crucial objective of systems biomedicine. This approach has not been widely investigated in the cardiovascular research area. Within this area, the prediction of clinical outcomes after suffering a heart attack would represent a significant step forward.

Inferring gene regression networks with model trees.

Background: Novel strategies are required in order to handle the huge amount of data produced by microarray technologies. To infer gene regulatory networks, the first step is to find direct regulatory relationships between genes building the so-called gene co-expression networks. They are typically generated using correlation statistics as pairwise similarity measures.

Gene association analysis: a survey of frequent pattern mining from gene expression data.

Establishing an association between variables is always of interest in genomic studies. Generation of DNA microarray gene expression data introduces a variety of data analysis issues not encountered in traditional molecular biology or medicine. Frequent pattern mining (FPM) has been applied successfully in business and scientific data for discovering interesting association patterns, and is becoming a promising strategy in microarray gene expression analysis.

Filling the gap between biology and computer science.

This editorial introduces BioData Mining, a new journal which publishes research articles related to advances in computational methods and techniques for the extraction of useful knowledge from heterogeneous biological data. We outline the aims and scope of the journal, introduce the publishing model and describe the open peer review policy, which fosters interaction within the research community.

Shifting and scaling patterns from gene expression data.

Motivation: During the last years, the discovering of biclusters in data is becoming more and more popular. Biclustering aims at extracting a set of clusters, each of which might use a different subset of attributes. Therefore, it is clear that the usefulness of biclustering techniques is beyond the traditional clustering techniques, especially when datasets present high or very high dimensionality.