Outcome-guided spike-and-slab Lasso Biclustering: A Novel Approach for Enhancing Biclustering Techniques for Gene Expression Analysis

Biclustering has gained interest in gene expression data analysis due to its ability to identify groups of samples that exhibit similar behaviour in specific subsets of genes (or vice versa), in contrast to traditional clustering methods that classify samples based on all genes. Despite advances, biclustering remains a challenging problem, even with cutting-edge methodologies. This paper introduces an extension of the recently proposed Spike-and-Slab Lasso Biclustering (SSLB) algorithm, termed Outcome-Guided SSLB (OG-SSLB), aimed at enhancing the identification of biclusters in gene expression analysis. Our proposed approach integrates disease outcomes into the biclustering framework through Bayesian profile regression. By leveraging additional clinical information, OG-SSLB improves the interpretability and relevance of the resulting biclusters. Comprehensive simulations and numerical experiments demonstrate that OG-SSLB achieves superior performance, with improved accuracy in estimating the number of clusters and higher consensus scores compared to the original SSLB method. Furthermore, OG-SSLB effectively identifies meaningful patterns and associations between gene expression profiles and disease states. These promising results demonstrate the effectiveness of OG-SSLB in advancing biclustering techniques, providing a powerful tool for uncovering biologically relevant insights. The OGSSLB software can be found as an R/C++ package at https://github.com/luisvargasmieles/OGSSLB.