A novel coupled two-way clustering approach to gene microarray data analysis, for identifying subsets of the genes and samples, such that when one of these items is used to cluster the other, stable and significant partitions emerge. The method of the present invention preferably uses iterative clustering in order to execute this search in an efficient way. This approach is especially suitable for gene microarray data, where the contributions of a variety of biological mechanisms to the gene expression levels are entangled in a large body of experimental data. The method of the present invention was applied to two gene microarray data sets, on colon cancer and leukemia. By identifying relevant subsets of the data and focusing on these subsets, partitions and correlations were found that were masked and hidden when the full data set was used in the analysis.