Combinatorial optimization models for finding genetic signatures from gene expression datasets.

The aim of this chapter is to present combinatorial optimization models and techniques for the analysis of microarray datasets. The chapter illustrates the application of a novel objective function that guides the search for high-quality solutions for sequential ordering of expression profiles. The approach is unsupervised and a metaheuristic method (a memetic algorithm) is used to provide high-quality solutions. For the problem of selecting discriminative groups of genes, we used a supervised method that has provided good results in a variety of datasets. This chapter illustrates the application of these models in an Alzheimer's disease microarray dataset.