Improved strategies for distance based clustering of objects on subsets of attributes in high-dimensional data

Abstract

This monograph focuses on clustering of objects in

high-dimensional data, given the restriction that the objects do not cluster

on all the attributes, not even on a single subset of attributes, but often

on different subsets of attributes in the data. With the objective to reveal such a clustering structure, Friedman and Meulman (2004) proposed a framework and a specific algorithm, called COSA. In this monograph we propose various improvements to the original COSA algorithm. The first improvement targets the optimization strategy for the tuning parameters in COSA. Further, a reformulation of the COSA criterion brings down the number of tuning parameters from two to one, enables incorporation of pre-specified initial weights for the attribute distances and allows for a solution that consists of zero-valued attribute weights. The third improvement consists of a new definition of the COSA distances that yields a better separation between objects from different clusters. We compared the `old' and the improved COSA with other state of the art methods. The comparison is based on simulated and real omics data sets.