Evaluation of classification and forecasting methods on time series gene expression data

Time series gene expression data is widely used to study different dynamic biological processes. Although gene expression datasets share many of the characteristics of time series data from other domains, most of the analyses in this field do not fully leverage the time-ordered nature of the data and focus on clustering the genes based on their expression values. Other domains, such as financial stock and weather prediction, utilize time series data for forecasting purposes. Moreover, many studies have been conducted to classify generic time series data based on trend, seasonality, and other patterns. Therefore, an assessment of these approaches on gene expression data would be of great interest to evaluate their adequacy in this domain. Here, we perform a comprehensive evaluation of different traditional unsupervised and supervised machine learning approaches as well as deep learning based techniques for time series gene expression classification and forecasting on five real datasets. In addition, we propose deep learning based methods for both classification and forecasting, and compare their performances with the state-of-the-art methods. We find that deep learning based methods generally outperform traditional approaches for time series classification. Experiments also suggest that supervised classification on gene expression is more effective than clustering when labels are available. In time series gene expression forecasting, we observe that an autoregressive statistical approach has the best performance for short term forecasting, whereas deep learning based methods are better suited for long term forecasting.