2-Way k-Means as a Model for Microbiome Samples

MotivationMicrobiome sequencing allows defining clusters of samples with shared composition. However, this paradigm poorly accounts for samples whose composition is a mixture of cluster-characterizing ones, and therefore lie in-between them in cluster space. This paper addresses unsupervised learning of 2-way clusters. It defines a mixture model that allows 2-way cluster assignment and describes a variant of generalized k-means for learning such a model. We demonstrate applicability to microbial 16S rDNA sequencing data from the Human Vaginal Microbiome Project.\n\nContactwjj2106@columbia.edu