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Automatic Clustering Of Biological Sequences

K-means requires one to specify the number of clusters; clustering based on HCL requires the user to visually inspect a tree. Have you successfully used an automatic clustering algorithm that provides an optimal partitioning of clustered data? Thanks, Anjan

clustering sequence
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updated by Steve Lianoglou Steve Lianoglou • written by Anjan Anjan

3 answers

I doubt that you can find any fully automatic clustering method that will always "optimally" partition your sequences - it so much depends on 1) the biological question you want to answer with your clustering, 2) the data itself.

For clustering protein sequences I always used http://www.eb.tuebingen.mpg.de/departments/1-protein-evolution/software/clans

It produces 3D graph layout of sequence space based on which I divided the sequences into clusters manually. In this program it's relatively do analyze the structure of sequence space, do all the selections etc., and find out which clusters the outliers belong to.

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written by Jan Kosinski Jan Kosinski

Thanks for the link. I was considering a multidimensional scaling approach to cluster a group of aligned sequences in 2/3-D space. In the second step I would run a Directed Evolution (DE) based clustering algorithm that would find the optimal partition. DE has been successfully used in automated clustering of diverse data and also image segmentation.

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written by Anjan Anjan

One method that I haven't seen mentioned here (or other linked articles) is affinity propagation. There is a video on the page that shows you how it works on a small dataset, and is (as far as I know) the only clustering-type algorithm that was the focus of an entire publication in Science(!).

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written by Steve Lianoglou Steve Lianoglou

I have tried affinity propagation in the scikit-learn package, and it looks pretty good. Basically, one feeds in an affinity matrix (calculated from a phylogenetic distance matrix by taking (1 - distance)), or euclidean coordinates that are derived from an affinity or distance matrix. If your labels are in your data as well, you can easily feed them in and find out who clusters with who. Sample code (minus the data I'm working with) available upon request!

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written by ericmajinglong ericmajinglong

Have a look at MCL graph clustering. http://micans.org/mcl/

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written by hadasa hadasa

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