Clustering Methods for

Abstract

It is now possible to simultaneously measure the expression of thousands of genes during cellular differentiation and response, through the use of DNA microarrays. A major statistical task is to understand the structure in the data that arise from this technology. In this paper we review various methods of clustering, and illustrate how they can be used to arrange both the genes and cell lines from a set of DNA microarray experiments. The methods discussed are global clustering techniques including hierarchical, K-means, and block clustering, and tree-structured vector quantization. Finally, we propose a new method for identifying structure in subsets of both genes and cell lines that are potentially obscured by the global clustering approaches.