Bicluster

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In bioinformatics and data mining, a bicluster is a set of genes and a set of samples in a submatrix that exhibit similar characteristics or trends. In other words, a bicluster is a relevant group of rows and relevant group of columns in a matrix.

We can characterize the biological phenomena it embodies by a collection of biclusters in a given gene expression matrix (i.e. microarray data), each representing a different type of joint behavior of a set of genes in a corresponding set of samples.

Biclustering techniques are used to identify subgroups of genes and subgroups of conditions/samples, i.e. bicluster, by performing simultaneous clustering of both rows and columns of the gene expression matrix.

[edit] Type of Bicluster

Different biclustering algorithms have different definitions of bicluster.

They are:

1. Bicluster with constant values (a),
2. Bicluster with constant values on rows or columns (b, c),
3. Bicluster with coherent values (d, e).