scholarly journals Optimal Clustering and Cluster Identity in Understanding High-Dimensional Data Spaces with Tightly Distributed Points

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 715-744 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Chikumbo ◽  
Vincent Granville

The sensitivity of the elbow rule in determining an optimal number of clusters in high-dimensional spaces that are characterized by tightly distributed data points is demonstrated. The high-dimensional data samples are not artificially generated, but they are taken from a real world evolutionary many-objective optimization. They comprise of Pareto fronts from the last 10 generations of an evolutionary optimization computation with 14 objective functions. The choice for analyzing Pareto fronts is strategic, as it is squarely intended to benefit the user who only needs one solution to implement from the Pareto set, and therefore a systematic means of reducing the cardinality of solutions is imperative. As such, clustering the data and identifying the cluster from which to pick the desired solution is covered in this manuscript, highlighting the implementation of the elbow rule and the use of hyper-radial distances for cluster identity. The Calinski-Harabasz statistic was favored for determining the criteria used in the elbow rule because of its robustness. The statistic takes into account the variance within clusters and also the variance between the clusters. This exercise also opened an opportunity to revisit the justification of using the highest Calinski-Harabasz criterion for determining the optimal number of clusters for multivariate data. The elbow rule predicted the maximum end of the optimal number of clusters, and the highest Calinski-Harabasz criterion method favored the number of clusters at the lower end. Both results are used in a unique way for understanding high-dimensional data, despite being inconclusive regarding which of the two methods determine the true optimal number of clusters.

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lin Zhang ◽  
Yanling He ◽  
Huaizhi Wang ◽  
Hui Liu ◽  
Yufei Huang ◽  
...  

Background: RNA methylome has been discovered as an important layer of gene regulation and can be profiled directly with count-based measurements from high-throughput sequencing data. Although the detailed regulatory circuit of the epitranscriptome remains uncharted, clustering effect in methylation status among different RNA methylation sites can be identified from transcriptome-wide RNA methylation profiles and may reflect the epitranscriptomic regulation. Count-based RNA methylation sequencing data has unique features, such as low reads coverage, which calls for novel clustering approaches. <P><P> Objective: Besides the low reads coverage, it is also necessary to keep the integer property to approach clustering analysis of count-based RNA methylation sequencing data. <P><P> Method: We proposed a nonparametric generative model together with its Gibbs sampling solution for clustering analysis. The proposed approach implements a beta-binomial mixture model to capture the clustering effect in methylation level with the original count-based measurements rather than an estimated continuous methylation level. Besides, it adopts a nonparametric Dirichlet process to automatically determine an optimal number of clusters so as to avoid the common model selection problem in clustering analysis. <P><P> Results: When tested on the simulated system, the method demonstrated improved clustering performance over hierarchical clustering, K-means, MClust, NMF and EMclust. It also revealed on real dataset two novel RNA N6-methyladenosine (m6A) co-methylation patterns that may be induced directly by METTL14 and WTAP, which are two known regulatory components of the RNA m6A methyltransferase complex. <P><P> Conclusion: Our proposed DPBBM method not only properly handles the count-based measurements of RNA methylation data from sites of very low reads coverage, but also learns an optimal number of clusters adaptively from the data analyzed. <P><P> Availability: The source code and documents of DPBBM R package are freely available through the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN): https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/DPBBM/.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 377-406
Author(s):  
Almog Lahav ◽  
Ronen Talmon ◽  
Yuval Kluger

Abstract A fundamental question in data analysis, machine learning and signal processing is how to compare between data points. The choice of the distance metric is specifically challenging for high-dimensional data sets, where the problem of meaningfulness is more prominent (e.g. the Euclidean distance between images). In this paper, we propose to exploit a property of high-dimensional data that is usually ignored, which is the structure stemming from the relationships between the coordinates. Specifically, we show that organizing similar coordinates in clusters can be exploited for the construction of the Mahalanobis distance between samples. When the observable samples are generated by a nonlinear transformation of hidden variables, the Mahalanobis distance allows the recovery of the Euclidean distances in the hidden space. We illustrate the advantage of our approach on a synthetic example where the discovery of clusters of correlated coordinates improves the estimation of the principal directions of the samples. Our method was applied to real data of gene expression for lung adenocarcinomas (lung cancer). By using the proposed metric we found a partition of subjects to risk groups with a good separation between their Kaplan–Meier survival plot.


2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 138-152
Author(s):  
Mujeeb Ur Rehman ◽  
Dost Muhammad Khan

Recently, anomaly detection has acquired a realistic response from data mining scientists as a graph of its reputation has increased smoothly in various practical domains like product marketing, fraud detection, medical diagnosis, fault detection and so many other fields. High dimensional data subjected to outlier detection poses exceptional challenges for data mining experts and it is because of natural problems of the curse of dimensionality and resemblance of distant and adjoining points. Traditional algorithms and techniques were experimented on full feature space regarding outlier detection. Customary methodologies concentrate largely on low dimensional data and hence show ineffectiveness while discovering anomalies in a data set comprised of a high number of dimensions. It becomes a very difficult and tiresome job to dig out anomalies present in high dimensional data set when all subsets of projections need to be explored. All data points in high dimensional data behave like similar observations because of its intrinsic feature i.e., the distance between observations approaches to zero as the number of dimensions extends towards infinity. This research work proposes a novel technique that explores deviation among all data points and embeds its findings inside well established density-based techniques. This is a state of art technique as it gives a new breadth of research towards resolving inherent problems of high dimensional data where outliers reside within clusters having different densities. A high dimensional dataset from UCI Machine Learning Repository is chosen to test the proposed technique and then its results are compared with that of density-based techniques to evaluate its efficiency.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Aikaterini Karanikola ◽  
Charalampos M. Liapis ◽  
Sotiris Kotsiantis

In short, clustering is the process of partitioning a given set of objects into groups containing highly related instances. This relation is determined by a specific distance metric with which the intra-cluster similarity is estimated. Finding an optimal number of such partitions is usually the key step in the entire process, yet a rather difficult one. Selecting an unsuitable number of clusters might lead to incorrect conclusions and, consequently, to wrong decisions: the term “optimal” is quite ambiguous. Furthermore, various inherent characteristics of the datasets, such as clusters that overlap or clusters containing subclusters, will most often increase the level of difficulty of the task. Thus, the methods used to detect similarities and the parameter selection of the partition algorithm have a major impact on the quality of the groups and the identification of their optimal number. Given that each dataset constitutes a rather distinct case, validity indices are indicators introduced to address the problem of selecting such an optimal number of clusters. In this work, an extensive set of well-known validity indices, based on the approach of the so-called relative criteria, are examined comparatively. A total of 26 cluster validation measures were investigated in two distinct case studies: one in real-world and one in artificially generated data. To ensure a certain degree of difficulty, both real-world and generated data were selected to exhibit variations and inhomogeneity. Each of the indices is being deployed under the schemes of 9 different clustering methods, which incorporate 5 different distance metrics. All results are presented in various explanatory forms.


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