Critical limitations of consensus clustering in class discovery.

ABSTRACT: Consensus clustering (CC) has been adopted for unsupervised class discovery in many genomic studies. It calculates how frequently two samples are grouped together in repeated clustering runs, and uses the resulting pairwise "consensus rates" for visual demonstration that clusters exist, for comparing cluster stability, and for estimating the optimal cluster number (K). However, the sensitivity and specificity of CC have not been systemically assessed. Through simulations we find that CC is able to divide randomly generated unimodal data into apparently stable clusters for a range of K, essentially reporting chance partitions of cluster-less data. For data with known structure, the common implementations of CC perform poorly in identifying the true K. These results suggest that CC should be

SUBMITTER: Senbabaoglu Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4145288 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature