A combination dimensionality reduction approach to codon position patterns of eubacteria based on their complete genomes

Graphical techniques have become powerful tools for the visualization and analysis of complicated biological systems. However, we cannot give such a graphical representation in a 2D/3D space when the dimensions of the represented data are more than three dimensions. The proposed method, a combination dimensionality reduction approach (CDR), consists of two parts: (i) principal component analysis (PCA) with a newly defined parameter ρ and (ii) locally linear embedding (LLE) with a proposed graphical selection for its optional parameter k. The CDR approach with ρ and k not only avoids loss of principal information, but also sufficiently well preserves the global high-dimensional structures in low-dimensional space such as 2D or 3D. The applications of the CDR on characteristic analysis at different codon positions in genome show that the method is a useful tool by which biologists could find useful biological knowledge.