Cluster Analysis of Microarray Data

Abstract

The cluster analysis has been widely applied by researchers from several scientific fields over the last decades. Advances in knowledge of biological phenomena have revived a great interest in cluster analysis due in part to the large amount of microarray data. Traditional clustering algorithms show, apart from the need of user-defined parameters, clear limitations to handle microarray data owing to its inherent characteristics: high-dimensional-low-sample-sized, highly redundant, and noisy. That has motivated the study of clustering algorithms tailored to the task of analyzing microarray data, which currently continue being developed and adapted. The present chapter is devoted to review clustering methods with different cluster analysis approaches in the challenging context of microarray data. Furthermore, the validation of the clustering results is briefly discussed by means of validity indexes used to assess the goodness of the number of clusters and the induced cluster assignments.

Keywords: Cluster analysis; Cluster stability; Clustering techniques; High-dimensional-low-sample-sized; Microarray data; Multiclustering methods; Validity indexes.