Patent ID: 7400981
Filing Date: 2008-07-15
Classification: G16B

Abstract:
1. A system for evaluating the quality of gene clustering, comprising: (a) means for identifying a set of genes; (b) means for partitioning the set of genes in (a) into disjoint subsets of genes known as clusters; (c) means for associating documents with each gene in the set of genes in (a), and a means for receiving the text of part or all of each said document; (d) means for constructing a compendium of documents for each individual subset of genes known in (b) as a cluster, said compendium consisting of documents containing text that had been received in (c), for all genes that are members of the subset of genes in said cluster; (e) means for dividing each and every compendium of documents in (d) into two parts, a training compendium of documents and a testing compendium of documents; (f) means for using words or phrases in the text of all the training compendia in (e) to train a document classifier, said training being performed by the computer program Rainbow using any of the classification algorithms that said program implements; (g) means for using words or phrases in the text of each document in each testing compendium in (e), to test the document classifier trained in (f), wherein the classifier predicts the cluster with which each test document is associated; (h) means for calculating and storing the number of documents in the test compendia in (e) that are correctly and incorrectly predicted to be associated with each cluster, upon testing with the trained document classifier as provided in (g); (i) means for repeatedly and randomly dividing documents into different training and test compendia as provided in (e), for using each such division to calculate a fraction of correct classifications for each cluster as provided in (f)-(h), and for storing said fractions for each and every such random division of documents into different training and test compendia; (j) means for repeatedly and randomly partitioning the set of genes in (a) into subsets, wherein the sizes of the random subsets of genes are matched to sizes of the clusters provided in (b); for re-associating a set of documents and text with each gene in the set as provided in (c); for making available means (d)-(h) so as to be able to calculate a fraction of correct classifications for each of the random gene partitions that are matched to the clusters provided in (b); and for storing said fractions for each and every such random partitioning of the set of genes in (a); (k) means for calculating the distribution of fractions of correctly classified documents that were generated by repeated, random partitioning of documents as provided in (i), and for the distribution of fractions of correctly classified documents that were generated by repeated, random partitioning of the set of genes as provided in (j); and for calculating a figure-of-merit for each cluster so as to characterize the difference between said distributions for each cluster; (l) means for displaying the distributions and their corresponding figure-of-merit as provided in (k), for each cluster as provided in (b), as an output to a user of the system; whereby said figure-of-merit for each cluster provides to a user of the system an indication of the extent to which some words and phrases, present in documents associated with genes in said cluster, collectively distinguish that cluster from all the other clusters, and whereby said figure-of-merit for each cluster provides to a user of the system an indication of the quality of that cluster.