ChARM: Discovery of combinatorial chromatin modification patterns in hepatitis B virus X-transformed mouse liver cancer using association rule mining.BACKGROUND
 We report a new computational approach, ChARM (Combinatorial Chromatin Modification Patterns using Association Rule Mining), that can be employed for the discovery of de novo combinatorial patterns of differential chromatin modifications.  We used ChARM to analyse chromatin modification data from the livers of normal (non-cancerous) mice and hepatitis B virus X (HBx)-transgenic mice with hepatocellular carcinoma, and discovered 2,409 association rules representing combinatorial chromatin modification patterns.  ChARM, an unsupervised method for discovering combinatorial chromatin modification patterns, can identify histone modifications that occur globally.  ChARM provides a scalable framework that can easily be applied to find various levels of combination patterns, which should reflect a range of globally common to locally rare chromatin modifications.
ChARM