An introduction for data mining in bioinformatics · Revised: Nov 29, 2011

In other words, you’re a bioinformatician, and data has been dumped in your lap. Find the patterns, trend, answers, or whatever meaningful knowledge the data is hiding. From experience, this is a frustrating position to be in. Data mining is a huge field and is easily bewildering. Nevertheless high throughput techniques in biology produce data requiring interpretation, especially if the data have been generated with a specific hypothesis.

People working in bioinformatics generally come from computer science or biology backgrounds. Data mining generally requires knowledge of both these fields with the additional requirements of statistics and mathematics. Hopefully these tips below may be able to give you guidance and an introduction to getting started.

What’s your question?

I cannot emphasise this enough. Always have a question in mind. Frame this question, so that it can be answered in a statistically sound way. Then answer the question. Importantly this question should be answerable with either true or false. Then even if the answer is negative and not what you were hoping for you still have something to write and publish.

Publication of negative results are important and should prevent other people going down the same path. Furthermore the more important the research question, the more important even negative results are. If the question isn’t important then perhaps ask why you’re working on it and what are the important questions.

Unfortunately in molecular biology one approach is to generate large amounts of data then ask someone in bioinformatics to find something publishable. This is exploratory data analysis and a rather unfair and risky position to be in. The reason this is risky is because you can sink months of time into looking at the data but still find nothing.

The answer for exploratory data is analysis is to understand why the data was produced in the first place. Try to find the underlying biological systems that are the target of investigation. Can you formulate a question that can be answered with yes/no or true/false from the data? Come up with several of these questions and then use the data to answer them. If you can’t think of any questions ask someone related to field to help you. If they can’t think of any, seriously consider what you can hope to achieve.

Find someone who knows what they are doing

And be very nice to them. People will often spend some time talking to you if you are enthusiastic and a patient listener. Importantly don’t expect anyone to do the work for you. This is a cardinal sin: dumping a pile of data in front of someone else lap and expecting answers.

Research the field, know your data backwards, and have some hypothesis and questions you’d like to answer. Talking to someone of a statistical nature will then often result in some advice on how to proceed. If they offer to meet on a semi-regular basis, even better. I guarantee that discussing the data with a third person, even if they are not Ronald Fisher, will still bring fresh perspectives you haven’t previously thought of.

Set a deadline

Without an end point, data mining can drag into weeks, months, or years. Searching for the elusive answer that will validate all of the time you have sunk into the project. Sometimes the answers to all of your questions can’t be found with the data. This can be demoralising to the point of considering a different career. I think it takes a non-trivial amount of discipline to finish of a project you’ve become very tired off. Unfortunately this is exactly what you have to do because you need the publication given the amount of time you’ve already invested.

Set a deadline. When you reach it, write up what you’ve done as a paper. Otherwise do you still want to be working on this project in another six months? Seeing your work outlined in manuscript form will show you where you need to go to finish the project. You’ll see whats need to be finalised and what is required for a coherent narrative. Even if the paper is not the ground-breaking work you were hoping for, you’ve still gotten something for your time.

The right tools

Excel and are fine tools for inputting data and creating simple graphs. I think however once you’re doing sophisticated data analysis you’ll need specific tools designed for this. I use R which both free and comes with many data mining packages such as vegan or labdsv. For beginners R can be impenetrable, I recommend this book as an introduction to R as well as the underlying statistics. I also hear good things about using python with the numpy and scipy packages.

Using the right tools is a good start also important is a good grounding is statistics and probability. For instance why should you and scale your variables before doing multivariate regression? What is the difference between a parametric vs. non-parametric tests? A good understanding of statistics will make you more confidence in your results and give you a better idea of which methods to use in different situations.

What are you doing?

The large amount of open source software makes it easy to rush into using support vector machines, hidden Markov models and neural networks. But coming back to the first point, what are you trying to prove? Always question what are you doing, how does it fit in to the wider picture? Try to regularly review, and keep track of where you are going. This will hoepfully keep you focused and lead to a satisfying analysis.

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