Comparison of similarity metrics in microarray experiment retrieval

Content-based retrieval of biological experiments is a recent challenge in bioinformatics. The task is to search in a database using a query-by-example without any meta-data annotation. In this study, for retrieving relevant microRNA experiments from microarray repositories, performance evaluation of known similarity metrics was conducted to compare experiment fingerprints. It was shown that Spearman correlation coefficient outperformed others by comparison on real datasets. This result shows that ranks of fingerprint values are more important than the exact values in experiment fingerprint.