Problems of Fuzzy Clustering of Microarray Data

Microarray technology has been the leading research direction in medicine, pharmacology, genome studies and other related areas over the past years. This technology enables researches to simultaneously study activity expression of tens of thousands of genes. After the experimental data have been processed, arrays of numerical values of gene expressions are obtained that are the basis for receiving relevant information and new knowledge. This paper briefly overviews the basics of microarray technology as well as task classes that could be solved using microarray data. The existing approaches to clustering gene expression sets are discussed. It is shown that the fuzzy c-means clustering method appears the most appropriate for that purpose. Due to that, the problem of choosing an optimal size of fuzziness parameter arises. Three widespread techniques for solving the problem are considered and their comparative analysis is provided.