CoIn: Correlation Induced Clustering for Cognition of High Dimensional Bioinformatics Data.

Abstract

Analysis of high dimensional biomedical data such as microarray gene expression data and mass spectrometry images, is crucial to provide better medical services including cancer subtyping, protein homology detection,etc. Clustering is a fundamental cognitive task which aims to group unlabeled data into multiple clusters based on their intrinsic similarities. The K-means algorithm is one of the most widely used clustering heuristics that aims at grouping the data objects into meaningful clusters such that the sum of squared Euclidean distances within each cluster is minimized. Its conceptual simplicity and computational efficiency make it easy to be used for wide applications of different data types. However, all features of data in K-means are considered equally in relevance, which distorts the performance when clustering high-dimensional data such as microarray gene expression data, mass spectrometry images, where there exist many redundant variables and correlated variables. In this paper, we propose a new correlation induced clustering, CoIn, to capture complex correlations among high dimensional data and guarantee the correlation consistency within each cluster. We evaluate the proposed method on a high dimensional mass spectrometry dataset of liver cancer tumor to explore the metabolic differences on tissues and discover the intra-tumor heterogeneity (ITH). By comparing the results of baselines and ours, it has been found that our method produces more explainable and understandable results for clinical analysis, which demonstrates the proposed clustering paradigm has the potential with application to knowledge discovery in high dimensional bioinformatics data.