Gene Chasing with the Hierarchical Clustering Explorer:

Finding Meaningful Clusters in High Dimensional Data

Jinwook Seo and Ben Shneiderman

HCIL

Understanding Clusters

• Cluster Identification – How to identify interesting clusters– Interactive exploration of clustering results

• Understanding Clusters– Expert’s domain knowledge– Intuitive search mechanisms– Overlap of clusters and search results

Time 0 12Hr 1Day 2Day ……………………………. 30Day 40Day

Measure the activities of

12,422 genes

at 27 time points

Mouse Muscle Regeneration

Clustering Result Overview

GenesTim

e

Searching for Clusters

Minimum Similarity Bar

Searching for Clusters

Searching for Clusters

Searching for Clusters

Zoom in to

Zoom in to

Hierarchical Clustering Explorer• 1400 downloads since April 2002

– www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hce– 1 commercial license to a biotech company

• Demonstration at HCIL1• Try HCE to analyze your multidimensional data

– 3138 US Counties– Demographic data

Sponsored by Children’s National Medical Center