Text Mining Perspectives in Microarray Data Mining

Current microarray data mining methods such as clustering, classification, and association analysis heavily rely on statistical and machine learning algorithms for analysis of large sets of gene expression data. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in methods that attempt to discover patterns based on multiple but related data sources. Gene expression data and the corresponding literature data are one such example. This paper suggests a new approach to microarray data mining as a combination of text mining (TM) and information extraction (IE). TM is concerned with identifying patterns in natural language text and IE is concerned with locating specific entities, relations, and facts in text. The present paper surveys the state of the art of data mining methods for microarray data analysis. We show the limitations of current microarray data mining methods and outline how text mining could address these limitations.