Distance-Based Clustering Challenges for Unbiased Benchmarking Studies
Authors: Thrun Michael 
Published: March 2021

Benchmark datasets with predefined cluster structures and high-dimensional biomedical datasets outline the challenges of cluster analysis: clustering algorithms are limited in their clustering ability in the presence of clusters defining distance-based structures resulting in a biased clustering solution. Data sets might not have cluster structures. Clustering yields arbitrary labels and often depends on the trial, leading to varying results. Moreover, recent research indicated that all partition comparison measures can yield the same results for different clustering solutions. Consequently, algorithm selection and parameter optimization by unsupervised quality measures (QM) are always biased and misleading. Only if the predefined structures happen to meet the particular clustering criterion and QM, can the clusters be recovered by one of the 34 open-source algorithms which are particularly useful in biomedical scenarios. Furthermore, comparative analysis with mirrored density plots provides a significantly more detailed benchmark than that with the typically used box plots or violin plots. Modern biomedical analysis techniques such as next-generation sequencing (NGS) have opened the door for complex high-dimensional data acquisition in medicine. For example, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) project provides open source cancer data for a worldwide community. The availability of such rich data sources, which enable discovering new insights into disease-related genetic mechanisms, is challenging for data analysts. Genome- or transcriptome-wide association studies may reveal novel disease-related genes, e.g.1, and virtual karyotyping by NGS-based low-coverage whole-genome sequencing may replace the conventional karyotyping technique 130 years after von Waldeyer described human chromosomes2. However, deciphering previously unknown relations and hierarchies in high-dimensional biological datasets remains a challenge for knowledge discovery, meaning that the identification of valid, novel, potentially useful, and ultimately understandable patterns in data (e.g.,3) is a difficult task. A common first step is identifying clusters of objects that are likely to be functionally related or interact4, which has provoked debates about the most suitable clustering approaches. However, the definition of a cluster remains a matter of ongoing discussion5,6. Therefore, clustering is restricted here to the task of separating data into similar groups (c.f.7,8). Vividly, relative relationships between high-dimensional data points are of interest to build up structures in data that a cluster analysis can identify. Therefore, it remains essential to evaluate the results of clustering algorithms and grasp the differences in the structures they can catch. Recent research on cluster analysis conveys the message that relevant and possibly prior unknown relationships in high-dimensional biological datasets can be discovered by employing optimization procedures and automatic pipelines for either benchmarking or algorithm selection (e.g.,4,9). The state-of-the-art approach is to use one or more unsupervised indices for automatic evaluation, e.g., Wiwie et al.4 suggest the following guidelines for biomedical data: "Use […] [hierarchical clustering*] or PAM. (2) Compute the silhouette values for clustering results using a broad range of parameter set variations. (3) Pick the result for the parameter set yielding the highest silhouette value" (*Restricted to UPGMA or average linking, see https://clusteval.sdu.dk/1/programs). Alternatively, the authors provide the possibility of using the internal Davies–Bouldin10 and Dunn11 indices. This work demonstrates the pitfalls and challenges of such approaches; more precisely, it shows that • Parameter optimization on datasets without distance-based clusters, • Algorithm selection by unsupervised quality measures on biomedical data, and • Benchmarking clustering algorithms with first-order statistics or box plots or a small number of trials are biased and often not recommended. Evidence for these pitfalls in cluster analysis is provided through the systematic and unbiased evaluation of 34 open source clustering algorithms with several bodies of data that possess clearly defined structures. These insights are particularly useful for knowledge discovery in biomedical scenarios. Select distance-based structures are consistently defined in artificial samples of data with specific pitfalls for clustering algorithms. Moreover, two natural datasets with investigated cluster structures are employed, and it is shown that the data reflect a true and valid empirical biomedical entity. This work shows that the limitations of clustering methods induced by their clustering criterion cannot be overcome by optimizing the algorithm parameters with a global criterion because such optimization can only reduce the variance but not the intrinsic bias. This limitation is outlined in two examples in which, by optimizing the quality measure of the Davies–Boulding index10, Dunn index11 or Silhouette value12, a specific cluster structure is imposed, but the clinically relevant cluster structures are not reproduced. The biases of conventional clustering algorithms are investigated on five artificially defined data structures and two high-dimensional datasets. Furthermore, a clustering algorithm's parameters can still be significantly optimized even if the dataset does not possess any distance-based cluster structure.