This paper presents a novel enumerative biclustering algorithm to directly mine all maximal biclusters in mixed-attribute datasets (containing both numerical and categorical attributes), with or without missing values. The proposal is an extension of RIn-Close_CVC, which was originally conceived to mine perfect or perturbed biclusters with constant values on columns solely from numerical datasets, and without missing values. Even endowed with additional and more general features, the extended RIn-Close_CVC retains four key properties: (1) efficiency, (2) completeness, (3) correctness, and (4) non-redundancy. Our proposal is the first one to deal with mixed-attribute datasets without requiring any pre-processing step, such as discretization and itemization of real-valued attributes. This is a decisive aspect, because discretization and itemization implies a priori decisions, with information loss and no clear control over the consequences. On the other hand, even having to specify a priori an individual threshold for each numerical attribute, that will be used to indicate internal consistency per attribute, each threshold will be applied during the construction of the biclusters, shaping the peculiarities of the data distribution. We also explore the strong connection between biclustering and frequent pattern mining to (1) provide filters to select a compact bicluster set that exhibits high relevance and low redundancy, and (2) in the case of labeled datasets, automatically present the biclusters in a user-friendly and intuitive form, by means of quantitative class association rules. Our experimental results showed that the biclusters yield a parsimonious set of relevant rules, providing useful and interpretable models for five mixed-attribute labeled datasets.
Mining matrices to find relevant biclusters, subsets of rows exhibiting a coherent pattern over a subset of columns, is a critical task for a wide-set of biomedical and social applications. Since biclustering is a challenging combinatorial optimization task, existing approaches place restrictions on the allowed structure, coherence and quality of biclusters. Biclustering approaches relying on pattern mining (PM) allow an exhaustive yet efficient space exploration together with the possibility to discover flexible structures of biclusters with parameterizable coherency and noise-tolerance. Still, state-of-the-art contributions are dispersed and the potential of their integration remains unclear.This work proposes a structured and integrated view of the contributions of state-of-the-art PM-based biclustering approaches, makes available a set of principles for a guided definition of new PM-based biclustering approaches, and discusses their relevance for applications in pattern recognition. Empirical evidence shows that these principles guarantee the robustness, efficiency and flexibility of PM-based biclustering. HighlightsPattern mining (PM) searches enable flexible, exhaustive and efficient biclusteringIntegration of existing dispersed PM-inspired contributions for biclustering.Principles for guided design and evaluation of new PM-based biclustering approachesPM-based biclustering solutions have parameterizable coherency and quality.