Denver Groups Classification of Human Chromosomes Using Fuzzy C-Means Clustering

Unbanded human chromosome can be classified into seven Denver Groups (A-G) based their lengths and the ratio of the length of the shorter arm to the whole length of the chromosome, which is called the centromere index (CI). In this article, the fuzzy c-means method will be used to perform the Denver Group classification of a given set of human chromosomes. The objective in clustering is to partition a given human chromosome set into homogeneous clusters; by homogeneous we mean that all points in the same cluster share similar attributes and they do not share similar attributes with points in other clusters. However, the separation of clusters and the meaning of similarity are fuzzy notions and can be described as such. It is found that the clusters iterations converge, highly depend on the initial partition matrix, U(0).