Pattern recognition techniques for the emerging field of bioinformatics: A review

The emerging field of bioinformatics has recently created much interest in the computer science and engineering communities. With the wealth of sequence data in many public online databases and the huge amount of data generated from the Human Genome Project, computer analysis has become indispensable. This calls for novel algorithms and opens up new areas of applications for many pattern recognition techniques. In this article, we review two major avenues of research in bioinformatics, namely DNA sequence analysis and DNA microarray data analysis. In DNA sequence analysis, we focus on the topics of sequence comparison and gene recognition. For DNA microarray data analysis, we discuss key issues such as image analysis for gene expression data extraction, data pre-processing, clustering analysis for pattern discovery and gene expression time series data analysis. We describe current methods and show how computational techniques could be useful in these areas. It is our hope that this review article could demonstrate how the pattern recognition community could have an impact on the fascinating and challenging area of genomic research. © 2005 Pattern Recognition Society. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.