Computational techniques and pattern recognition [Introduction to the special issue]

Bioinformatics data come in various forms such as biological sequences, molecular structures, gene and protein expressions, molecular networks, cellular images, and literature. A major aspect of discovering biological knowledge is to search, predict, and model specific patterns of the data that are likely to be associated with an important biological phenomenon or another set of data. One of the major discoveries in bioinformatics is that specific patterns in our genome and proteome are able to decipher our characters and how prone we are for certain diseases. To date, pattern recognition algorithms have been successfully applied or catered to address a wide range of bioinformatics problems. This issue highlights a few such applications that were selected from the presentations at the Third International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics (PRIB 2007), Singapore.