Clustering in Life Sciences

Clustering is the task of organizing a set of objects into meaningful groups. These groups can be disjoint, overlapping, or organized in some hierarchical fashion. The key element of clustering is the notion that the discovered groups are meaningful . This definition is intentionally vague, because what constitutes meaningful is, to a large extent, application dependent. In some applications, this may translate to groups in which the pairwise similarity between their objects is maximized, and the pairwise similarity between objects of different groups is minimized. In some other applications, this may translate to groups that contain objects that share some key characteristics, even though their overall similarity is not the highest. Clustering is an exploratory tool for analyzing large data sets and has been used extensively in numerous application areas.