Gene Analytics: Discovery and Contextualization of Enriched Gene Sets

The paper present a preliminary study of creative knowledge discovery through bisociative data analysis. Bisociative reasoning is at the heart of creative, accidental discovery (serendipity), and is focused on finding unexpected links by crossing different contexts. Contextualization and linking between highly diverse and distributed data and knowledge sources is therefore crucial for implementation of bisociative reasoning. In the paper we explore these ideas on the problem of analysis of microarray data. We show how enriched gene sets are found by using ontology information as background knowledge in semantic subgroup discovery. These genes are then contextualized by the computation of probabilistic links to diverse bioinformatics resources. Results of two case studies are used to illustrate the approach.