Inferring Gene-Gene Associations from Quantitative Association Rules

Abstract

The microarray technique is able to monitor the change in concentration of RNA in thousands of genes simultaneously. The interest in this technique has grown exponentially in recent years and the difficulties in analyzing data from such experiments, which are characterized by the high number of genes to be analyzed in relation to the low number of experiments or samples available. Microarray experiments are generating datasets that can help in reconstructing gene networks. One of the most important problems in network reconstruction is finding, for each gene in the network, which genes can affect it and how. Association Rules are an approach of unsupervised learning to relate attributes to each other. In this work we use Quantitative Association Rules in order to define interrelations between genes. These rules work with intervals on the attributes, without discretizing the data before and they are generated by a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm. In most cases the extracted rules confirm the existing knowledge about cell-cycle gene expression, while hitherto unknown relationships can be treated as new hypotheses.