Clustering of temporal gene expression data with mixtures of mixed effects models

• Main Author: Lu, Darlene
• Other Authors: Demissie, Serkalem
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Biostatistics; Clustering; EM algorithm; Gene expression; Mixture model; Model selection; Polynomial regression
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/2144/34905

While time-dependent processes are important to biological functions, methods to leverage temporal information from large data have remained computationally challenging. In temporal gene-expression data, clustering can be used to identify genes with shared function in complex processes. Algorithms like K-Means and standard Gaussian mixture-models (GMM) fail to account for variability in replicated data or repeated measures over time and require a priori cluster number assumptions, evaluating many cluster numbers to select an optimal result. An improved penalized-GMM offers a computationally-efficient algorithm to simultaneously optimize cluster number and labels. The work presented in this dissertation was motivated by mice bone-fracture models interested in determining patterns of temporal gene-expression during bone-healing progression. To solve this, an extension to the penalized-GMM was proposed to account for correlation between replicated data and repeated measures over time by introducing random-effects using a mixture of mixed-effects polynomial regression models and an entropy-penalized EM-Algorithm (EPEM). First, performance of EPEM for different mixed-effects models were assessed with simulation studies and applied to the fracture-healing study. Second, modifications to address the high computational cost of EPEM were considered that either clustered subsets of data determined by predicted polynomial-order (S-EPEM) or used modified-initialization to decrease the initial burden (I-EPEM). Each was compared to EPEM and applied to the fracture-healing study. Lastly, as varied rates of fracture-healing were observed for mice with different genetic-backgrounds (strains), a new analysis strategy was proposed to compare patterns of temporal gene-expression between different mice-strains and assessed with simulation studies. Expression-profiles for each strain were treated as separate objects to cluster in order to determine genes clustered into different groups across strain. We found that the addition of random-effects decreased accuracy of predicted cluster labels compared to K-Means, GMM, and fixed-effects EPEM. Polynomial-order optimization with BIC performed with highest accuracy, and optimization on subspaces obtained with singular-value-decomposition performed well. Computation time for S-EPEM was much reduced with a slight decrease in accuracy. I-EPEM was comparable to EPEM with similar accuracy and decrease in computation time. Application of the new analysis strategy on fracture-healing data identified several distinct temporal gene-expression patterns for the different strains. === 2021-02-27T00:00:00Z