Informatively clustering longitudinal microarrays using binary or survival outcome data.

The goal of this research is to discover what groups of genes are associated with the disease process. We use binary and failure time outcomes to inform the clustering of longitudinally-collected microarray data. We propose a linear model with normally distributed cluster-specific random effects for the longitudinal gene expression trajectory. The random effects are linearly related to a latent continuous representation of the outcome, where the probability or hazard of the outcome depends on these latent variables. We apply our method to microarray data collected from trauma patients in the Inflammation and Host Response to Injury project.