Bisociative knowledge discovery for microarray data analysis

The paper presents an approach to computational knowledge discovery through the mechanism of bisociation. Bisociative reasoning is at the heart of creative, accidental discovery (e.g., serendipity), and is focused on finding unexpected links by crossing contexts. Contextualization and linking between highly diverse and distributed data and knowledge sources is therefore crucial for the implementation of bisociative reasoning. In the paper we explore these ideas on the problem of analysis of microarray data. We show how enriched gene sets are found by using ontology information as background knowledge in semantic subgroup discovery. These genes are then contextualized by the computation of probabilistic links to diverse bioinformatics resources. Preliminary experiments with microarray data illustrate the approach.