CPS analysis: self-contained validation of biomedical data clustering

Abstract

Cluster analysis is widely used to identify interesting subgroups in biomedical data. Since true class labels are unknown in the unsupervised setting, it is challenging to validate any cluster obtained computationally, an important problem barely addressed by the research community. We have developed a toolkit called covering point set (CPS) analysis to quantify uncertainty at the levels of individual clusters and overall partitions. Functions have been developed to effectively visualize the inherent variation in any cluster for data of high dimension, and provide more comprehensive view on potentially interesting subgroups in the data. Applying to three usage scenarios for biomedical data, we demonstrate that CPS analysis is more effective for evaluating uncertainty of clusters comparing to state-of-the-art measurements. We also showcase how to use CPS analysis to select data generation technologies or visualization methods. The method is implemented in an R package called OTclust, available on CRAN. lzz46@psu.edu or jiali@psu.edu. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.