Bioinformatics, a field devoted to the interpretation and analysis of biological data using computational techniques, has evolved tremendously in recent years due to the explosive growth of biological information generated by the scientific community. Soft computing is a consortium of methodologies that work synergistically and provides, in one form or another, flexible information processing capabilities for handling real-life ambiguous situations. Several research articles dealing with the application of soft computing tools to bioinformatics have been published in the recent past; however, they are scattered in different journals, conference proceedings and technical reports, thus causing inconvenience to readers, students and researchers.

This book, unique in its nature, is aimed at providing a treatise in a unified framework, with both theoretical and experimental results, describing the basic principles of soft computing and demonstrating the various ways in which they can be used for analyzing biological data in an efficient manner. Interesting research articles from eminent scientists around the world are brought together in a systematic way such that the reader will be able to understand the issues and challenges in this domain, the existing ways of tackling them, recent trends, and future directions. This book is the first of its kind to bring together two important research areas, soft computing and bioinformatics, in order to demonstrate how the tools and techniques in the former can be used for efficiently solving several problems in the latter.

Contents:

• Overview:
• Bioinformatics: Mining the Massive Data from High Throughput Genomics Experiments (H Tang & S Kim)
• An Introduction to Soft Computing (A Konar & S Das)
• Biological Sequence and Structure Analysis:
• Reconstructing Phylogenies with Memetic Algorithms and Branch-and-Bound (J E Gallardo et al.)
• Classification of RNA Sequences with Support Vector Machines (J T L Wang & X Wu)
• Beyond String Algorithms: Protein Sequence Analysis Using Wavelet Transforms (A Krishnan & K-B Li)
• Filtering Protein Surface Motifs Using Negative Instances of Active Sites Candidates (N L Shrestha & T Ohkawa)
• Distill: A Machine Learning Approach to Ab Initio Protein Structure Prediction (G Pollastri et al.)
• In Silico Design of Ligands Using Properties of Target Active Sites (S Bandyopadhyay et al.)
• Gene Expression and Microarray Data Analysis:
• Inferring Regulations in a Genomic Network from Gene Expression Profiles (N Noman & H Iba)
• A Reliable Classification of Gene Clusters for Cancer Samples Using a Hybrid Multi-Objective Evolutionary Procedure (K Deb et al.)
• Feature Selection for Cancer Classification Using Ant Colony Optimization and Support Vector Machines (A Gupta et al.)
• Sophisticated Methods for Cancer Classification Using Microarray Data (S-B Cho & H-S Park)
• Multiobjective Evolutionary Approach to Fuzzy Clustering of Microarray Data (A Mukhopadhyay et al.)