Data Mining Over Biological Datasets: An Integrated Approach Based on Computational Intelligence

Biology is in the middle of a data explosion. The technical advances achieved by the genomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics and proteomics technologies in recent years have significantly increased the amount of data that are available for biologists to analyze different aspects of an organism. However, *omics data sets have several additional problems: they have inherent biological complexity and may have significant amounts of noise as well as measurement artifacts. The need to extract information from such databases has once again become a challenge. This requires novel computational techniques and models to automatically perform data mining tasks such as integration of different data types, clustering and knowledge discovery, among others. In this article, we will present a novel integrated computational intelligence approach for biological data mining that involves neural networks and evolutionary computation. We propose the use of self-organizing maps for the identification of coordinated patterns variations; a new training algorithm that can include a priori biological information to obtain more biological meaningful clusters; a validation measure that can assess the biological significance of the clusters found; and finally, an evolutionary algorithm for the inference of unknown metabolic pathways involving the selected clusters.