Identification of the clustering structure in microbiome data by density clustering on the Manhattan distance

Abstract

Clustering technology is a method for grouping data points into clusters containing a group of similar data points. In a real dataset such as microbiome data, the data points are presented as profiles or a probability distribution. These data points form the periphery of a cluster, making it difficult to identify the real clustering structure. In this study, we used density clustering on several distance measures to overcome this difficulty. Experiments using a real dataset indicated that the Manhattan distance is an appropriate distance measure for clustering analysis of microbiome data.