mergeClusters {chroGPS} | R Documentation

## Unsupervised cluster merging based on their observed overlap with automatic changepoint detection.

### Description

The function uses contour density estimation as computed by the `clusGPS` function to merge significantly overlapping clusters in an unsupervised manner. In each step, clusters with highest overlap are merged, their individual density estimates are updated in a computational feasible manner, and the process continues until the maximum overlap between any given pair of clusters drops swiftly, as detected by the `cpt.mean` function in the `changepoint` package.

### Usage

    mergeClusters(clus, clus.method = "unweighted", cpt.method = "mean", logscale = TRUE, brake = rep(1, length(clus@clus)), plt = TRUE, mc.cores = 1)

### Arguments

`clus` | A `clusGPS` object from which we want to merge clusters with a significant overlap when visualized on a chroGPS MDS map. This is quite useful when a clustering method (i.e. hierarchical clustering with average linkage) tends to return a high number of overlapping clusters.
`clus.method` | Currently only 'unweighted' method is supported, that is, cluster overlap is computed based on spatial location of contours, but the computed overlaps are not weighted for cluster size.
`cpt.method` | Use 'mean' for using `cpt.mean` function in `changepoint` package for computing overlap changepoint. Use 'var' for `cpt.var`. See specific function help for details.
`logscale` | Defaults to TRUE. Whether to use decimal or log scale values for computing overlap changepoint.
`brake` | (Optional). By default, the function returns the clusters from the optimal merging step as detected by the changepoint functions (brake=1). By using smaller values (0, -1, -2, ...) or bigger ones (2, 3, 4, ...) the algorithm can be forced to return the result from any previous or later merging step respectively.
`plt` | Set to TRUE to visualize maximum cluster overlap for each merging step and changepoint detection (optimal merging step).
`mc.cores` | Numbers of cores to use in parallel computation.

### Value

A `clusGPS` object where significantly overlapping clusters are merged, highly improving visualization, cluster robustness and further study of the epigenetic configuration of the chroGPS map.

### Author(s)

Oscar Reina.

### References

Changepoint package from Killick et al, 2012.

### See Also

See documentation for package `changepoint`, `clusGPS` for epigenetic cluster generation.

### Examples

    # Not run
    # data(s2)
    # # Computing distances
    # d <- distGPS(s2.tab,metric='tanimoto',uniqueRows=TRUE)
    # # Creating MDS object
    # mds1 <- mds(d,type='isoMDS')
    # mds1
    # plot(mds1)
    # Precomputing clustering
    # h <- hclust(as.dist(d@d),method='average')
    # # Calculating densities (contours and probabilities), takes a while
    # clus <- clusGPS(d,mds1,preMerge=TRUE,k=300) # Generating a high number of clusters
    # clus <- mergeClusters(clus)

[Package chroGPS version 1.27.3 Index]