Mohd Saberi Mohamad

A review on the computational approaches for gene regulatory network construction

Many biological research areas such as drug design require gene regulatory networks to provide clear insight and understanding of the cellular process in living cells. This is because interactions among the genes and their products play an important role in many molecular processes. A gene regulatory network can act as a blueprint for the researchers to observe the relationships among genes. Due to its importance, several computational approaches have been proposed to infer gene regulatory networks from gene expression data. In this review, six inference approaches are discussed: Boolean network, probabilistic Boolean network, ordinary differential equation, neural network, Bayesian network, and dynamic Bayesian network. These approaches are discussed in terms of introduction, methodology and recent applications of these approaches in gene regulatory network construction. These approaches are also compared in the discussion section. Furthermore, the strengths and weaknesses of these computational approaches are described.

A New Hybrid Firefly Algorithm for Complex and Nonlinear Problem

Global optimization methods play an important role to solve many real-world problems. However, the implementation of single methods is excessively preventive for high dimensionality and nonlinear problems, especially in term of the accuracy of finding best solutions and convergence speed performance. In recent years, hybrid optimization methods have shown potential achievements to overcome such challenges. In this paper, a new hybrid optimization method called Hybrid Evolutionary Firefly Algorithm (HEFA) is proposed. The method combines the standard Firefly Algorithm (FA) with the evolutionary operations of Differential Evolution (DE) method to improve the searching accuracy and information sharing among the fireflies. The HEFA method is used to estimate the parameters in a complex and nonlinear biological model to address its effectiveness in high dimensional and nonlinear problem. Experimental results showed that the accuracy of finding the best solution and convergence speed performance of the proposed method is significantly better compared to those achieved by the existing methods.

Random forest for gene selection and microarray data classification.

A random forest method has been selected to perform both gene selection and classification of the microarray data. In this embedded method, the selection of smallest possible sets of genes with lowest error rates is the key factor in achieving highest classification accuracy. Hence, improved gene selection method using random forest has been proposed to obtain the smallest subset of genes as well as biggest subset of genes prior to classification. The option for biggest subset selection is done to assist researchers who intend to use the informative genes for further research. Enhanced random forest gene selection has performed better in terms of selecting the smallest subset as well as biggest subset of informative genes with lowest out of bag error rates through gene selection. Furthermore, the classification performed on the selected subset of genes using random forest has lead to lower prediction error rates compared to existing method and other similar available methods.

A HYBRID OF GENETIC ALGORITHM AND SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE FOR FEATURES SELECTION AND CLASSIFICATION OF GENE EXPRESSION MICROARRAY

Constantly improving gene expression technology offer the ability to measure the expression levels of thousand of genes in parallel. Gene expression data is expected to significantly aid in the development of efficient cancer diagnosis and classification platforms. Key issue that needs to be addressed is the selection of small number of genes that contribute to a disease from the thousands of genes measured on microarrays that are inherently noisy. This work deals with finding a small subset of informative genes from gene expression microarray data which maximise the classification accuracy. This paper introduces a new algorithm of hybrid Genetic Algorithm and Support Vector Machine for genes selection and classification task. We show that the classification accuracy of the proposed algorithm is superior to a number of current state-of-the-art methods of two widely used benchmark datasets. The informative genes from the best subset are validated and verified by comparing them with the biological results produced from biologist and computer scientist researches in order to explore the biological plausibility.

A multi-objective strategy in genetic algorithms for gene selection of gene expression data

A microarray machine offers the capacity to measure the expression levels of thousands of genes simultaneously. It is used to collect information from tissue and cell samples regarding gene expression differences that could be useful for cancer classification. However, the urgent problems in the use of gene expression data are the availability of a huge number of genes relative to the small number of available samples, and the fact that many of the genes are not relevant to the classification. It has been shown that selecting a small subset of genes can lead to improved accuracy in the classification. Hence, this paper proposes a solution to the problems by using a multiobjective strategy in a genetic algorithm. This approach was tried on two benchmark gene expression data sets. It obtained encouraging results on those data sets as compared with an approach that used a single-objective strategy in a genetic algorithm.

An enhancement of binary particle swarm optimization for gene selection in classifying cancer classes

BackgroundGene expression data could likely be a momentous help in the progress of proficient cancer diagnoses and classification platforms. Lately, many researchers analyze gene expression data using diverse computational intelligence methods, for selecting a small subset of informative genes from the data for cancer classification. Many computational methods face difficulties in selecting small subsets due to the small number of samples compared to the huge number of genes (high-dimension), irrelevant genes, and noisy genes.MethodsWe propose an enhanced binary particle swarm optimization to perform the selection of small subsets of informative genes which is significant for cancer classification. Particle speed, rule, and modified sigmoid function are introduced in this proposed method to increase the probability of the bits in a particle’s position to be zero. The method was empirically applied to a suite of ten well-known benchmark gene expression data sets.ResultsThe performance of the proposed method proved to be superior to other previous related works, including the conventional version of binary particle swarm optimization (BPSO) in terms of classification accuracy and the number of selected genes. The proposed method also requires lower computational time compared to BPSO.

A model for gene selection and classification of gene expression data

Gene expression data are expected to be of significant help in the development of efficient cancer diagnosis and classification platforms. One problem arising from these data is how to select a small subset of genes from thousands of genes and a few samples that are inherently noisy. This research aims to select a small subset of informative genes from the gene expression data which will maximize the classification accuracy. A model for gene selection and classification has been developed by using a filter approach, and an improved hybrid of the genetic algorithm and a support vector machine classifier. We show that the classification accuracy of the proposed model is useful for the cancer classification of one widely used gene expression benchmark data set.

Differential Bees Flux Balance Analysis with OptKnock for In Silico Microbial Strains Optimization

Microbial strains optimization for the overproduction of desired phenotype has been a popular topic in recent years. The strains can be optimized through several techniques in the field of genetic engineering. Gene knockout is a genetic engineering technique that can engineer the metabolism of microbial cells with the objective to obtain desirable phenotypes. However, the complexities of the metabolic networks have made the process to identify the effects of genetic modification on the desirable phenotypes challenging. Furthermore, a vast number of reactions in cellular metabolism often lead to the combinatorial problem in obtaining optimal gene deletion strategy. Basically, the size of a genome-scale metabolic model is usually large. As the size of the problem increases, the computation time increases exponentially. In this paper, we propose Differential Bees Flux Balance Analysis (DBFBA) with OptKnock to identify optimal gene knockout strategies for maximizing the production yield of desired phenotypes while sustaining the growth rate. This proposed method functions by improving the performance of a hybrid of Bees Algorithm and Flux Balance Analysis (BAFBA) by hybridizing Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm into neighborhood searching strategy of BAFBA. In addition, DBFBA is integrated with OptKnock to validate the results for improving the reliability the work. Through several experiments conducted on Escherichia coli, Bacillus subtilis, and Clostridium thermocellum as the model organisms, DBFBA has shown a better performance in terms of computational time, stability, growth rate, and production yield of desired phenotypes compared to the methods used in previous works.

A Review for Detecting Gene-Gene Interactions Using Machine Learning Methods in Genetic Epidemiology

Recently, the greatest statistical computational challenge in genetic epidemiology is to identify and characterize the genes that interact with other genes and environment factors that bring the effect on complex multifactorial disease. These gene-gene interactions are also denoted as epitasis in which this phenomenon cannot be solved by traditional statistical method due to the high dimensionality of the data and the occurrence of multiple polymorphism. Hence, there are several machine learning methods to solve such problems by identifying such susceptibility gene which are neural networks (NNs), support vector machine (SVM), and random forests (RFs) in such common and multifactorial disease. This paper gives an overview on machine learning methods, describing the methodology of each machine learning methods and its application in detecting gene-gene and gene-environment interactions. Lastly, this paper discussed each machine learning method and presents the strengths and weaknesses of each machine learning method in detecting gene-gene interactions in complex human disease.

Feature Selection and Classifier Parameters Estimation for EEG Signals Peak Detection Using Particle Swarm Optimization

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal peak detection is widely used in clinical applications. The peak point can be detected using several approaches, including time, frequency, time-frequency, and nonlinear domains depending on various peak features from several models. However, there is no study that provides the importance of every peak feature in contributing to a good and generalized model. In this study, feature selection and classifier parameters estimation based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) are proposed as a framework for peak detection on EEG signals in time domain analysis. Two versions of PSO are used in the study: (1) standard PSO and (2) random asynchronous particle swarm optimization (RA-PSO). The proposed framework tries to find the best combination of all the available features that offers good peak detection and a high classification rate from the results in the conducted experiments. The evaluation results indicate that the accuracy of the peak detection can be improved up to 99.90% and 98.59% for training and testing, respectively, as compared to the framework without feature selection adaptation. Additionally, the proposed framework based on RA-PSO offers a better and reliable classification rate as compared to standard PSO as it produces low variance model.