A Convolutional Deep Clustering Framework for Gene Expression Time Series

The functional or regulatory processes within the cell are explicitly governed by the expression levels of a subset of its genes. Gene expression time series captures activities of individual genes over time and aids revealing underlying cellular dynamics. An important step in high-throughput gene expression time series experiment is clustering genes based on their temporal expression patterns and is conventionally achieved by unsupervised machine learning techniques. However, most of the clustering techniques either suffer from the short length of gene expression time series or ignore temporal structure of the data. In this work, we propose DeepTrust, a novel deep learning-based framework for gene expression time series clustering which can overcome these issues. DeepTrust initially transforms time series data into images to obtain richer data representations. Afterwards, a deep convolutional clustering algorithm is applied on the constructed images. Analyses on both simulated and biological data sets exhibit the efficiency of this new framework, compared to widely used clustering techniques. We also utilize enrichment analyses to illustrate the biological plausibility of the clusters detected by DeepTrust. Our code and data are available from http://github.com/tanlab/DeepTrust.