Detecting cell cycle-regulated genes using Self-Organizing Maps with statistical Phase Synchronization (SOMPS) algorithm

Developing computational methods for identifying cell cycle-regulated genes has been one of important topics in systems biology. Most of previous methods consider the periodic characteristics of expression signals to identify the cell cycle-regulated genes. However, we assume that cell cycle-regulated genes are relatively active having relatively many interactions with each other based on the underlying cellular network. Thus, we are motivated to apply the theory of multivariate phase synchronization to the cell cycle expression analysis. In this study, we apply the method known as "Self-Organizing Maps with statistical Phase Synchronization (SOMPS)", which is the combination of self-organizing map and multivariate phase synchronization, producing several subsets of genes that are expected to have interactions with each other in their subset (Kim, 2008). Our evaluation experiments show that the SOMPS algorithm is able to detect cell cycle-regulated genes as much as one of recently reported method that performs better than most existing methods.