Hi all,

I would like to assess the robustness of a dendrogram.

The general purpose is to compare biological samples evaluated by mass spectrometry. I developped an algorithm in order to compute a distance matrix in order to classify samples. I would like to assess the robustness of the obtained dendrogram, but i don't know really how to do so. I knew that a bioconductor package called pvclust was able to do so by bootstrapping, the problem is taht pvclust function does not accept a user-defined distance matrix computation function.

Do you know either

• if there is another package which would allow me to define my distance definition (or distance matrix computation function)
• if there are a good introductory course on clustering / dendrogram robustness assessment ?

Thanks in advance,

Julien