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In recent years, data mining and analysis of high-throughput sequencing of microbiomes and metagenomic data enable researchers to discover biological knowledge by characterizing the composition and variation of species across environmental samples and to accumulate a huge amount of data, making it feasible to infer the complex principle of species interactions. The interactions of microbes in a microbial community play an important role in microbial ecological system. Data mining provides diverse approachs to identify the correlations between disease and microbes and how microbial species coexist and interact in a host-associated or natural environment. This is not only important to advance basic microbiology science and other related fields but also important to understand the impacts of microbial communities on human health and diseases.

Clinical documents are rich free-text data sources containing valuable medication and symptom information, which have a great potential to improve health care. In this paper, we build an integrating system for extracting medication names and symptom names from clinical notes. Then we apply nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) and multi-view NMF to cluster clinical notes into meaningful clusters based on sample-feature matrices. Our experimental results show that multi-view NMF is a preferable method for clinical document clustering. Moreover, we find that using extracted medication/symptom names to cluster clinical documents outperforms just using words.

In this paper, we present a method that enable both homology-based approach and composition-based approach to further study the functional core (i.e., microbial core and gene core, correspondingly). In the proposed method, the identification of major functionality groups is achieved by generative topic modeling, which is able to extract useful information from unlabeled data. We first show that generative topic model can be used to model the taxon abundance information obtained by homology-based approach and study the microbial core. The model considers each sample as a “document,” which has a mixture of functional groups, while each functional group (also known as a “latent topic”) is a weight mixture of species. Therefore, estimating the generative topic model for taxon abundance data will uncover the distribution over latent functions (latent topic) in each sample. Second, we show that, generative topic model can also be used to study the genome-level composition of “N-mer” features (DNA subreads obtained by composition-based approaches). The model consider each genome as a mixture of latten genetic patterns (latent topics), while each functional pattern is a weighted mixture of the “N-mer” features, thus the existence of core genomes can be indicated by a set of common N-mer features. After studying the mutual information between latent topics and gene regions, we provide an explanation of the functional roles of uncovered latten genetic patterns. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed method.

Background: The growth of the biomedical information requires most information retrieval systems to provide short and specific answers in response to complex user queries. Semantic information in the form of free text that is structured in a way makes it straightforward for humans to read but more difficult for computers to interpret automatically and search efficiently. One of the reasons is that most traditional information retrieval models assume terms are conditionally independent given a document/passage. Therefore, we are motivated to consider term associations within different contexts to help the models understand semantic information and use it for improving biomedical information retrieval performance., Results: We propose a term association approach to discover term associations among the keywords from a query. The experiments are conducted on the TREC 2004-2007 Genomics data sets and the TREC 2004 HARD data set. The proposed approach is promising and achieves superiority over the baselines and the GSP results. The parameter settings and different indices are investigated that the sentence-based index produces the best results in terms of the document-level, the word-based index for the best results in terms of the passage-level and the paragraph-based index for the best results in terms of the passage2-level. Furthermore, the best term association results always come from the best baseline. The tuning number k in the proposed recursive re-ranking algorithm is discussed and locally optimized to be 10., Conclusions: First, modelling term association for improving biomedical information retrieval using factor analysis, is one of the major contributions in our work. Second, the experiments confirm that term association considering co-occurrence and dependency among the keywords can produce better results than the baselines treating the keywords independently. Third, the baselines are re-ranked according to the importance and reliance of latent factors behind term associations. These latent factors are decided by the proposed model and their term appearances in the first round retrieved passages.

Feature representation is essential to machine learning and text mining. In this paper, we present a feature coupling generalization (FCG) framework for generating new features from unlabeled data. It selects two special types of features, i.e., example-distinguishing features (EDFs) and class-distinguishing features (CDFs) from original feature set, and then generalizes EDFs into higher-level features based on their coupling degrees with CDFs in unlabeled data. The advantage is: EDFs with extreme sparsity in labeled data can be enriched by their co-occurrences with CDFs in unlabeled data so that the performance of these low-frequency features can be greatly boosted and new information from unlabeled can be incorporated. We apply this approach to three tasks in biomedical literature mining: gene named entity recognition (NER), protein-protein interaction extraction (PPIE), and text classification (TC) for gene ontology (GO) annotation. New features are generated from over 20 GB unlabeled PubMed abstracts. The experimental results on BioCreative 2, AIMED corpus, and TREC 2005 Genomics Track show that 1) FCG can utilize well the sparse features ignored by supervised learning. 2) It improves the performance of supervised baselines by 7.8 percent, 5.0 percent, and 5.8 percent, respectively, in the tree tasks. 3) Our methods achieve 89.1, 64.5 F-score, and 60.1 normalized utility on the three benchmark data sets.

Background: Newly microarray technologies yield large-scale datasets. The microarray datasets are usually presented in 2D matrices, where rows represent genes and columns represent experimental conditions. Systematic analysis of those datasets provides the increasing amount of information, which is urgently needed in the post-genomic era. Biclustering, which is a technique developed to allow simultaneous clustering of rows and columns of a dataset, might be useful to extract more accurate information from those datasets. Biclustering requires the optimization of two conflicting objectives (residue and volume), and a multi-objective artificial immune system capable of performing a multi-population search. As a heuristic search technique, artificial immune systems (AISs) can be considered a new computational paradigm inspired by the immunological system of vertebrates and designed to solve a wide range of optimization problems. During biclustering several objectives in conflict with each other have to be optimized simultaneously, so multi-objective optimization model is suitable for solving biclustering problem., Results: Based on dynamic population, this paper proposes a novel dynamic multi-objective immune optimization biclustering (DMOIOB) algorithm to mine coherent patterns from microarray data. Experimental results on two common and public datasets of gene expression profiles show that our approach can effectively find significant localized structures related to sets of genes that show consistent expression patterns across subsets of experimental conditions. The mined patterns present a significant biological relevance in terms of related biological processes, components and molecular functions in a species-independent manner., Conclusions: The proposed DMOIOB algorithm is an efficient tool to analyze large microarray datasets. It achieves a good diversity and rapid convergence.

Background: Extracting protein-protein interactions from biomedical literature is an important task in biomedical text mining. Supervised machine learning methods have been used with great success in this task but they tend to suffer from data sparseness because of their restriction to obtain knowledge from limited amount of labelled data. In this work, we study the use of unlabeled biomedical texts to enhance the performance of supervised learning for this task. We use feature coupling generalization (FCG) - a recently proposed semi-supervised learning strategy - to learn an enriched representation of local contexts in sentences from 47 million unlabeled examples and investigate the performance of the new features on AIMED corpus., Results: The new features generated by FCG achieve a 60.1 F-score and produce significant improvement over supervised baselines. The experimental analysis shows that FCG can utilize well the sparse features which have little effect in supervised learning. The new features perform better in non-linear classifiers than linear ones. We combine the new features with local lexical features, obtaining an F-score of 63.5 on AIMED corpus, which is comparable with the current state-of-the-art results. We also find that simple Boolean lexical features derived only from local contexts are able to achieve competitive results against most syntactic feature/kernel based methods., Conclusions: FCG creates a lot of opportunities for designing new features, since a lot of sparse features ignored by supervised learning can be utilized well. Interestingly, our results also demonstrate that the state-of-the art performance can be achieved without using any syntactic information in this task.

Data preprocessing is an important and critical step in the data mining process and it has a huge impact on the success of a data mining project. In this paper, we present an algorithm DB-HReduction, which discretizes or eliminates numeric attributes and generalizes or eliminates symbolic attributes very efficiently and effectively. This algorithm greatly decreases the number of attributes and tuples of the data set and improves the accuracy and decreases the running time of the data mining algorithms in the later stage. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We propose a novel semantic query expansion technique that combines association rules with ontologies and Natural Language Processing techniques. Our technique is different from others in that (1) it utilizes the explicit semantics as well as other linguistic properties of unstructured text corpus, (2) it makes use of contextual properties of important terms discovered by association rules, and (3) ontology entries are added to the query by disambiguating word senses. Using TREC ad hoc queries we achieve from 13.41% to 32.39% improvement for P@20 and from 8.39% to 14.22% for the F-measure. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]