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OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology
Consensus Framework for Exploring Microarray Data Using Multiple Clustering Methods

To cite this article:
Ted Laderas, Shannon McWeeney. OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology. Spring 2007, 11(1): 116-128. doi:10.1089/omi.2006.0008.

Published in Volume: 11 Issue 1: April 5, 2007

Full Text: • PDF for printing (9,749 KB) • PDF w/ links (344.3 KB)


Ted Laderas
Informatics Shared Resource, OHSU Cancer Institute, Portland, Oregon.
Center for Biostatistics, Computing, and Informatics in Biology and Medicine, Portland, Oregon.
OHSU NHLBI Microarray Program, Portland, Oregon.
Shannon McWeeney
Informatics Shared Resource, OHSU Cancer Institute, Portland, Oregon.
Center for Biostatistics, Computing, and Informatics in Biology and Medicine, Portland, Oregon.
OHSU NHLBI Microarray Program, Portland, Oregon.
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, OGI School of Science and Engineering, Portland, Oregon.
Division of Biostatistics, Department of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Portland, Oregon.
Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon.

The large variety of clustering algorithms and their variants can be daunting to researchers wishing to explore patterns within their microarray datasets. Furthermore, each clustering method has distinct biases in finding patterns within the data, and clusterings may not be reproducible across different algorithms. A consensus approach utilizing multiple algorithms can show where the various methods agree and expose robust patterns within the data. In this paper, we present a software package—Consense, written for R/Bioconductor—that utilizes such an approach to explore microarray datasets. Consense produces clustering results for each of the clustering methods and produces a report of metrics comparing the individual clusterings. A feature of Consense is identification of genes that cluster consistently with an index gene across methods. Utilizing simulated microarray data, sensitivity of the metrics to the biases of the different clustering algorithms is explored. The framework is easily extensible, allowing this tool to be used by other functional genomic data types, as well as other high-throughput OMICS data types generated from metabolomic and proteomic experiments. It also provides a flexible environment to benchmark new clustering algorithms. Consense is currently available as an installable R/Bioconductor package (http://www.ohsucancer.com/isrdev/consense/).

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This paper was cited by:

Unsupervised Selection of Highly Coexpressed and Noncoexpressed Genes Using a Consensus Clustering Approach
Tung T. Nguyen, Richard S. Nowakowski, Ioannis P. Androulakis
OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology. Jun 2009, Vol. 13, No. 3: 219-237
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