An Ultra-Fast Method for Clustering of Big Genomic Data

Abstract

The clustering process is used to identify cancer subtypes based on gene expression and DNA methylation datasets, since cancer subtype information is critically important for understanding tumor heterogeneity, detecting previously unknown clusters of biological samples, which are usually associated with unknown types of cancer will, in turn, gives way to prescribe more effective treatments for patients. This is because cancer has varying subtypes which often respond disparately to the same treatment. While the DNA methylation database is extremely large-scale datasets, running time still remains a major challenge. Actually, traditional clustering algorithms are too slow to handle biological high-dimensional datasets, they usually require large amounts of computational time. The proposed clustering algorithm extraordinarily overcomes all others in terms of running time, it is able to rapidly identify a set of biologically relevant clusters in large-scale DNA methylation datasets, its superiority over the others has been demonstrated regarding its relative speed.