A heuristic algorithm solving the mutual-exclusivity-sorting problem

Abstract

Motivation: Binary (or Boolean) matrices provide a common effective data representation adopted in several domains of computational biology, especially for investigating cancer and other human diseases. For instance, they are used to summarize genetic aberrations—copy number alterations or mutations—observed in cancer patient cohorts, effectively highlighting combinatorial relations among them. One of these is the tendency for two or more genes not to be co-mutated in the same sample or patient, i.e. a mutual-exclusivity trend. Exploiting this principle has allowed identifying new cancer driver protein-interaction networks and has been proposed to design effective combinatorial anti-cancer therapies rationally. Several tools exist to identify and statistically assess mutualexclusive cancer-driver genomic events. However, these tools need to be equipped with robust/efficient methods to sort rows and columns of a binary matrix to visually highlight possible mutual-exclusivity trends.

Publication
Bioinformatics