An Approach to Automated Knowledge Discovery in Bioinformatics

Extensive data mining applications to bioinformatics research have shown that knowledge discovery requires repeated manual interventions, and that conglomerating and summarizing the results would be time consuming and sometimes error prone. To assist in efficiently applying data mining technologies in bioinformatics, we have developed Automation facilities in our data mining software suite. Experiences gained from case studies are extracted and presented as scenarios, which are sets of data processing and analysis operations for specific data mining objectives. Built as sequences of these predefined scenarios, procedures apply previously established data mining strategies to new data sets in an automated way. Automation also highlights the results particularly related to researchers’ own areas of interest. We present insights into our automated knowledge discovery and two example scenarios extracted from one case study to demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.