Affiliations 

  • 1 School of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Leeds, Leeds, West Yorkshire LS2 9JT, UK
Nucleic Acids Res, 2017 04 20;45(7):e53.
PMID: 27994031 DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkw1270

Abstract

Clustering is used widely in 'omics' studies and is often tackled with standard methods, e.g. hierarchical clustering. However, the increasing need for integration of multiple data sets leads to a requirement for clustering methods applicable to mixed data types, where the straightforward application of standard methods is not necessarily the best approach. A particularly common problem involves clustering entities characterized by a mixture of binary data (e.g. presence/absence of mutations, binding, motifs and epigenetic marks) and continuous data (e.g. gene expression, protein abundance, metabolite levels). Here, we present a generic method based on a probabilistic model for clustering this type of data, and illustrate its application to genetic regulation and the clustering of cancer samples. We show that the resulting clusters lead to useful hypotheses: in the case of genetic regulation these concern regulation of groups of genes by specific sets of transcription factors and in the case of cancer samples combinations of gene mutations are related to patterns of gene expression. The clusters have potential mechanistic significance and in the latter case are significantly linked to survival. The method is available as a stand-alone software package (GNU General Public Licence) from http://github.com/BioToolsLeeds/FlexiCoClusteringPackage.git.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.