Functional Annotation of Genes through Statistical Analysis of Biomedical Articles

One of the most elaborate and important tasks inbiology is the functional annotation of genes.Biologists have developed standardized and structuredvocabularies, called bio-ontologies, to assist them indescribing the different functions. A critical issue inthe assignment of functions to genes is the utilizationof knowledge from published biomedical articles. Thepurpose of this paper is to present a unified andcomprehensive statistical methodology for functionallyannotating genes using biomedical literature.Specifically, classification models are built using thediscriminant analysis method while validation,analysis and interpretation of the results is based ongraphical methods and various performance metricsand techniques. The general conclusions from thestudy are very promising, in the sense that theproposed methodology not only performs well in theassignment of functions to genes, but also providesuseful and interpretable results regarding thediscriminating power of certain keywords in the texts.