Pooled variable scaling for cluster analysis

Abstract

We propose a new approach for scaling prior to cluster analysis based on the concept of pooled variance. Unlike available scaling procedures such as the standard deviation and the range, our proposed scale avoids dampening the beneficial effect of informative clustering variables. We confirm through an extensive simulation study and applications to well known real data examples that the proposed scaling method is safe and generally useful. Finally, we use our approach to cluster a high dimensional genomic dataset consisting of gene expression data for several specimens of breast cancer cells tissue.