A GRASP metaheuristic for microarray data analysis

The Weighted Gene Regulatory Network (WGRN) problem consists in pruning a regulatory network obtained from DNA microarray gene expression data, in order to identify a reduced set of candidate elements which can explain the expression of all other genes. Since the problem appears to be particularly hard for general-purpose solvers, we develop a Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) and refine it with three alternative Path Relinking procedures. For comparison purposes, we also develop a Tabu Search algorithm with a self-adapting tabu tenure. The experimental results show that GRASP performs better than Tabu Search and that Path Relinking significantly contributes to its effectiveness.