Finding associations between genes by time-series microarray sequential patterns analysis

Data mining techniques can be applied to identify patterns of interest in the gene expression data. One goal in mining gene expression data is to determine how the expression of any particular gene might affect the expression of other genes. To find relationships between different genes, association rules have been applied to gene expression data set [1]. A notable limitation of association rule mining method is that only the association in a single profile experiment can be detected. It cannot be used to find rules across different condition profiles or different time point profile experiments. However, with the appearance of time-series microarray data, it became possible to analyze the temporal relationship between genes. In this paper, we analyze the time-series microarray gene expression data to extract the sequential patterns which are similar to the association rules between genes among different time points in the yeast cell cycle. The sequential patterns found in our work can catch the associations between different genes which express or repress at diverse time points. We have applied sequential pattern mining method to time-series microarray gene expression data and discovered a number of sequential patterns from two groups of genes (test, control) and more sequential patterns have been discovered from test group (same CO term group) than from the control group (different GO term group). This result can be a support for the potential of sequential patterns which is capable of catching the biologically meaningful association between genes.