Pathway clusters of aging genes using data mining techniques

Exploring and identifying novel aging genes has been the current area of interest in Gerontology. A variety of techniques have been proposed to identify the genes that affect the centenarians and the focus is on the study of genes of interest affecting older population. However the study of aging related pathways using computational methods has not been discussed explicitly so far. In this paper, an attempt is made to cluster the aging genes into different biological pathways using data mining techniques. Text mining is used to identify the most relevant keywords from different pathway databases, which is used as one of the feature describing a gene. K-means clustering is done on the aging pathway dataset. The clusters formed are in good agreement with the background knowledge about the aging genes and their pathways. The quality of the K-means clustering is quite promising as it well separates the different aging genes into their respective pathways.