Advances in Computational Intelligence and Bioinformatics

Abstract

Bioinformatics is the application of information technology and computer science to the field of molecular biology. The potential range of applications of bioinformatics techniques is quite large, including ontologies in biomedicine, biomolecular dynamics, comparative genomics, gene expression analysis, protein structure prediction, protein expression analysis, protein–protein docking, and biological systems modeling. Currently, we are at the beginning of the so-called Post-Genomic Era, characterized on one hand by the availability of huge amounts of biomolecular data, and on the other hand by the need for new and efficient mathematical methods and algorithms capable of distill the information contained in the data. As a matter of fact, the emphasis of research in Bioinformatics is shifting from the development of efficient data storing and handling methods, to the one of methods able to extract useful information from data. Computational Intelligence methodologies (that is, neural networks, evolutionary algorithms and fuzzy logic), partly inspired by natural systems, are a family of powerful methods for data analysis able to transform the available heterogeneous data into biological knowledge. In the previous years, these algorithms have been successfully applied in almost all areas of Bioinformatics to the solution of complex problems concerning signal analysis, classification, clustering, feature selection, data mining, and visualization. The activities of the Special Interest Group in Bioinformatics of the International Neural Network Society, established in 2005, are aimed to promoting the development of new and efficient Computational Intelligence data analysis tools for the analysis of biomolecular data and to their diffusion in the Bioinformatics community, with the organization of special sessions, workshops and schools, multi-author volumes and special issues of international journals. This special issue of Soft Computing, A Fusion of Foundations, Methodologies and Applications on ‘‘Advances in Computational Intelligence and Bioinformatics’’ collects five papers related to the initiatives of the Special Interest Group in Bioinformatics that took place in 2008, including the Special Session on Analysis of High Dimensional Data in Bioinformatics at the World Conference on Computational Intelligence (WCCI 2008) held in Hong Kong and the Fifth International Meeting on Computational Intelligence Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics (CIBB 2008) held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy. The opening paper, ‘‘Clustering of Protein Expression Data: a Benchmark of Statistical and Neural Approaches’’ by I. H. Jarman, T. A. Etchells, D. Bacciu, J. M. Garibaldi, I. O. Ellis, and P. J. G. Lisboa, reviews two clustering methodologies applied to a protein expression data set for breast cancer, namely a reproducible approach to modelfree clustering and a probabilistic competitive neural F. Masulli (&) DISI, Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze, dell’Informazione, Universita di Genova, Via Dodecaneso 35, Genoa, Italy e-mail: masulli@disi.unige.it