Gene Ordering in Microarray Data Using Parallel Memetic Algorithms
A. Mendes, C. Cotta, V. Garcia, P. França, P. Moscato
Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Parallel Processing Workshops, T. Skie, C.-S. Yang (eds.), pp. 604-611, IEEE
Press, Oslo, Norway, 2005
This paper addresses the Microarray Gene Ordering
problem. It consists in ordering a set of genes, grouping together
the ones with similar behavior. This behavior can be measured as the
gene's activity level across a number of measurements. The Gene
Ordering problem belongs to the NP-hard class and has strong
implications in genetic and medical areas. The method employed is a
Memetic Algorithm, which is a variant of the well known Genetic
Algorithms. The algorithm employs several features like population
structure, problem-specific crossover and mutation operators, local
search, and parallel processing. The instances utilized are
extracted from the literature and represent real systems with 106 up
to 979 genes. The algorithm has a superior performance, successfully
grouping the genes. Moreover, in this paper we evaluate the impact
of parallel processing in the performance of the algorithm,
especially for the larger instances, which required more
computational effort.