A GO Similarity Measurement Method Based on Information Contents and Semantic Values(<Special Issue>Information Systems and Human Sciences)

Abstract

Gene ontology (GO) which describes a biological concept of genes has attracted attention as an index for measuring semantic similarity of genes. This paper considers a new method for measuring a semantic similarity of GO, which removes some drawbacks of existing measurement methods. The proposed method is constructed by incorporating the concept of information content into the semantic value. It is shown that the proposed method is superior to existing methods through experiments with pathway data.