EBIC: an open source software for high-dimensional and big data analyses

Abstract

Abstract Motivation In this paper, we present an open source package with the latest release of Evolutionary-based BIClustering (EBIC), a next-generation biclustering algorithm for mining genetic data. The major contribution of this paper is adding a full support for multiple graphics processing units (GPUs) support, which makes it possible to run efficiently large genomic data mining analyses. Multiple enhancements to the first release of the algorithm include integration with R and Bioconductor, and an option to exclude missing values from the analysis. Results Evolutionary-based BIClustering was applied to datasets of different sizes, including a large DNA methylation dataset with 436 444 rows. For the largest dataset we observed over 6.6-fold speedup in computation time on a cluster of eight GPUs compared to running the method on a single GPU. This proves high scalability of the method. Availability and implementation The latest version of EBIC could be downloaded from http://github.com/EpistasisLab/ebic. Installation and usage instructions are also available online. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.