Computation Cluster Validation in the Big Data Era

Abstract

Data-driven class discovery, i.e., the inference of cluster structure in a dataset, is a fundamental task in Data Analysis, in particular for the Life Sciences. We provide a tutorial on the most common approaches used for that task, focusing on methodologies for the prediction of the number of clusters in a dataset. Although the methods that we present are general in terms of the data for which they can be used, we offer a case study relevant for Microarray Data Analysis