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COBRA

2002

Cluster analysis

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A New Partitioning Around Medoids Algorithm, Mark J. Van Der Laan, Katherine S. Pollard, Jennifer Bryan Feb 2002

A New Partitioning Around Medoids Algorithm, Mark J. Van Der Laan, Katherine S. Pollard, Jennifer Bryan

U.C. Berkeley Division of Biostatistics Working Paper Series

Kaufman & Rousseeuw (1990) proposed a clustering algorithm Partitioning Around Medoids (PAM) which maps a distance matrix into a specified number of clusters. A particularly nice property is that PAM allows clustering with respect to any specified distance metric. In addition, the medoids are robust representations of the cluster centers, which is particularly important in the common context that many elements do not belong well to any cluster. Based on our experience in clustering gene expression data, we have noticed that PAM does have problems recognizing relatively small clusters in situations where good partitions around medoids clearly exist. In this …