PSO-CFDP: A Particle Swarm Optimization-Based Automatic Density Peaks Clustering Method for Cancer Subtyping

Cancer subtyping is of great importance for the prediction, diagnosis, and precise treatment of cancer patients. Many clustering methods have been proposed for cancer subtyping. In 2014, a clustering algorithm named Clustering by Fast Search and Find of Density Peaks (CFDP) was proposed and published in Science, which has been applied to cancer subtyping and achieved attractive results. However, CFDP requires to set two key parameters (cluster centers and cutoff distance) manually, while their optimal values are difficult to be determined. To overcome this limitation, an automatic clustering method named PSO-CFDP is proposed in this paper, in which cluster centers and cutoff distance are automatically determined by running an improved particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm multiple times. Experiments using PSO-CFDP, as well as LR-CFDP, STClu, CH-CCFDAC, and CFDP, were performed on four benchmark datasets and two real cancer gene expression datasets. The results show that PSO-CFDP can determine cluster centers and cutoff distance automatically within controllable time/cost and, therefore, improve the accuracy of cancer subtyping.