Massive Associative K-biclustering (MAK) v1.0
Massive Associative K-biclustering (MAK) is a method to address the key limitations in other biclustering approaches. In a formal evaluation against new simulated data sets with more realistic properties MAK improves recovery of biclusters exhibiting common behavior across conditions, with the highest F1 scores, a measure of a test's accuracy, and lowest false positive rates, the probability of falsely rejecting the null hypothesis, compared to established methods. The developers show how MAK can be applied to a popular data set from Saccharomyces cerevisiae to uncover new properties not captured by other methods. MAK biclusters showed increased statistical enrichments for known regulatory associations and gene functions, including for nearly 30% of the novel MAK biclusters not found by other methods. Compared to other methods, MAK results had at least two-fold higher coverage of differential expression in the overall dataset, an overlapping bicluster network with distinct modules for protein expression and energy metabolism, and biologically relevant overlapping biclusters including cases of combinatorial regulation. MAK is suited for large datasets with many potentially noisy and overlapping patterns of varying sizes.