ERICA: Quantifying Replicability of Cluster Analysis
For researchers using clustering, ERICA provides a practical tool to assess whether discovered clusters are replicable, addressing a gap in quantitative scrutiny.
ERICA introduces a pipeline to quantify the replicability of cluster analysis via a replicability statistic and visualization tools. Applied to synthetic data it finds replicable clusters, but on three breast cancer gene expression datasets it reveals potential non-replicability, highlighting the need for rigorous inspection.
Despite being ubiquitous in science, clustering remains a technique whose results are not quantitatively scrutinized via a framework. We present an analysis called evaluating replicability via iterative clustering assignments (ERICA) that is applied to a dataset to determine whether clusters are identified in a replicable manner. The pipeline computes a statistic that describes whether structure is found in a dataset. Quantitative visualization methods are presented to answer important questions such as the similarity between clusters, and the identity of points that may be outliers. When tested on synthetic data, the findings show clusters being discovered in a replicable manner. However, we note a possibility for non-replicable results when the pipeline is applied to three gene expression datasets for breast cancer subtype validation. The study underscores the need for rigorous inspection and offers a practical tool for doing so.