Semi-supervised analysis of gene expression profiles for lineage-specific development in the Caenorhabditis elegans embryo

Gene expression profiling is a powerful approach to identify genes that may be involved in a specific biological process on a global scale. For example, gene expression profiling of mutant animals that lack or contain an excess of certain cell types is a common way to identify genes that are important for the development and maintenance of given cell types. However, it is difficult for traditional computational methods, including unsupervised and supervised learning methods, to detect relevant genes from a large collection of expression profiles with high sensitivity and specificity. Unsupervised methods group similar gene expressions together while ignoring important prior biological knowledge. Supervised methods utilize training data from prior biological knowledge to classify gene expression. However, for many biological problems, little prior knowledge is available, which limits the prediction performance of most supervised methods.