Towards a Unified Taxonomy of Biclustering Methods
This work is incremental, providing a systematic framework for researchers in data mining and bioinformatics to better organize and compare biclustering techniques.
The paper addresses the lack of a consistent and comprehensive taxonomy for biclustering methods by proposing to use concept lattices and attribute exploration to build and complete a unified taxonomy, aiming to integrate overlooked methods like BiMax and formal concepts.
Being an unsupervised machine learning and data mining technique, biclustering and its multimodal extensions are becoming popular tools for analysing object-attribute data in different domains. Apart from conventional clustering techniques, biclustering is searching for homogeneous groups of objects while keeping their common description, e.g., in binary setting, their shared attributes. In bioinformatics, biclustering is used to find genes, which are active in a subset of situations, thus being candidates for biomarkers. However, the authors of those biclustering techniques that are popular in gene expression analysis, may overlook the existing methods. For instance, BiMax algorithm is aimed at finding biclusters, which are well-known for decades as formal concepts. Moreover, even if bioinformatics classify the biclustering methods according to reasonable domain-driven criteria, their classification taxonomies may be different from survey to survey and not full as well. So, in this paper we propose to use concept lattices as a tool for taxonomy building (in the biclustering domain) and attribute exploration as means for cross-domain taxonomy completion.