OP-cluster: clustering by tendency in high dimensional space

Clustering is the process of grouping a set of objects into classes of similar objects. Because of unknownness of the hidden patterns in the data sets, the definition of similarity is very subtle. Until recently, similarity measures are typically based on distances, e.g Euclidean distance and cosine distance. We propose a flexible yet powerful clustering model, namely OP-cluster (Order Preserving Cluster). Under this new model, two objects are similar on a subset of dimensions if the values of these two objects induce the same relative order of those dimensions. Such a cluster might arise when the expression levels of (coregulated) genes can rise or fall synchronously in response to a sequence of environment stimuli. Hence, discovery of OP-Cluster is essential in revealing significant gene regulatory networks. A deterministic algorithm is designed and implemented to discover all the significant OP-Clusters. A set of extensive experiments has been done on several real biological data sets to demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency in detecting coregulated patterns.