Abstract
Epigenetic changes are a necessary characteristic of all cancer types. Tumor cells usually target genetic changes and epigenetic alterations as well. It is most beneficial to identify epigenetic similar features among cancer various types to be able to discover the appropriate treatments. The existence of epigenetic alteration profiles can aid in targeting this goal. In this paper, we propose a new technique applying data mining and clustering methodologies for cancer epigenetic changes analysis. The proposed technique aims to detect common patterns of epigenetic changes in various cancer types. We demonstrated the validation of the new technique by detecting epigenetic patterns across seven cancer types and by determining epigenetic similarities among various cancer types. The experimental results demonstrate that common epigenetic patterns do exist across these cancer types. Additionally, epigenetic gene analysis performed on the associated genes found a strong relationship with the development of various types of cancer and proved high risk across the studied cancer types. We utilized the frequent pattern data mining approach to represent cancer types compactly in the promoters for some epigenetic marks. Utilizing the built frequent pattern item set, the most frequent items are identified and yield the group of the bi-clusters of these patterns. Experimental results of the proposed method are shown to have a success rate of 88% in detecting cancer types according to specific epigenetic pattern.