Recursive Consensus Clustering for novel subtype discovery from transcriptome data

Abstract

Large-scale transcriptomic data is used by biologists for the discovery of new molecular patterns or cell subpopulations. Clustering is one of the most popular methods for dimensionality reduction and data analysis for large scale datasets. The major problem while clustering the data is the selection of the optimal number of clusters (k) for each dataset and to discover new insights from it. We have developed Recursive Consensus Clustering (RCC), an unsupervised clustering algorithm for novel subtype discovery from both bulk and single-cell datasets. RCC is available as an R package and facilitates the generation of new biological insights through intuitive visualization of clustering results.