Biclustering has proved to be a powerful data analysis technique due to its wide success in various application domains. However, the existing literature presents efficient solutions only for enumerating maximal biclusters with constant values, or heuristic-based approaches which can not find all biclusters or even support the maximality of the obtained biclusters. Here, we present a general family of biclustering algorithms for enumerating all maximal biclusters with (i) constant values on rows, (ii) constant values on columns, or (iii) coherent values. Versions for perfect and for perturbed biclusters are provided. Our algorithms have four key properties (just the algorithm for perturbed biclusters with coherent values fails to exhibit the first property): they are (1) efficient (take polynomial time per pattern), (2) complete (find all maximal biclusters), (3) correct (all biclusters attend the user-defined measure of similarity), and (4) non-redundant (all the obtained biclusters are maximal and the same bicluster is not enumerated twice). They are based on a generalization of an efficient formal concept analysis algorithm called In-Close2. Experimental results point to the necessity of having efficient enumerative biclustering algorithms and provide a valuable insight into the scalability of our family of algorithms and its sensitivity to user-defined parameters.
We consider the problem of discovering association rules between items in a large database of sales transactions. We present two new algorithms for solving thii problem that are fundamentally different from the known algorithms. Empirical evaluation shows that these algorithms outperform the known algorithms by factors ranging from three for small problems to more than an order of magnitude for large problems. We also show how the best features of the two proposed algorithms can be combined into a hybrid algorithm, called AprioriHybrid. Scale-up experiments show that AprioriHybrid scales linearly with the number of transactions. AprioriHybrid also has excellent scale-up properties with respect to the transaction size and the number of items in the database. The discovery of biclusters, which denote groups of items that show coherent values across a subset of all the transactions in a data set, is an important type of analysis performed on real-valued data sets in various domains, such as biology. Several algorithms have been proposed to find different types of biclusters in such data sets. However, these algorithms are unable to search the space of all possible biclusters exhaustively. Pattern mining algorithms in association analysis also essentially produce biclusters as their result, since the patterns consist of items that are supported by a subset of all the transactions. However, a major limitation of the numerous techniques developed in association analysis is that they are only able to analyze data sets with binary and or categorical variables, and their application to real-valued data sets often involves some lossy transformation such as discretization or binarization of the attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel association analysis framework for exhaustively and efficiently mining "range support" patterns from such a data set. On one hand, this framework reduces the loss of information incurred by the binarization- and discretization-based approaches, and on the other, it enables the exhaustive discovery of coherent biclusters. We compared the performance of our framework with two standard biclustering algorithms through the evaluation of the similarity of the cellular functions of the genes constituting the patterns biclusters derived by these algorithms from microarray data. These experiments show that the real-valued patterns discovered by our framework are better enriched by small biologically interesting functional classes. Also, through specific examples, we demonstrate the ability of the RAP framework to discover functionally enriched patterns that are not found by the commonly used biclustering algorithm ISA. The source code and data sets used in this paper, as well as the supplementary material, are available at http: www.cs.umn.edu vk gaurav rap.