Editing Cluster analysis (section)

===Biology, computational biology and bioinformatics===

{{See also|Distance matrices in phylogeny}}

; [[Plant]] and [[animal]] [[ecology]]
:Cluster analysis is used to describe and to make spatial and temporal comparisons of communities (assemblages) of organisms in heterogeneous environments. It is also used in [[Systematics|plant systematics]] to generate artificial [[Phylogeny|phylogenies]] or clusters of organisms (individuals) at the species, genus or higher level that share a number of attributes.
; [[Transcriptomics]]
:Clustering is used to build groups of [[genes]] with related expression patterns (also known as coexpressed genes) as in [[HCS clustering algorithm]].<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Johnson|first=Stephen C.|s2cid=930698|date=1967-09-01|title=Hierarchical clustering schemes|journal=Psychometrika|language=en|volume=32|issue=3|pages=241–254|doi=10.1007/BF02289588|pmid=5234703|issn=1860-0980}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Hartuv|first1=Erez|last2=Shamir|first2=Ron|date=2000-12-31|title=A clustering algorithm based on graph connectivity|journal=Information Processing Letters|volume=76|issue=4|pages=175–181|doi=10.1016/S0020-0190(00)00142-3|issn=0020-0190}}</ref> Often such groups contain functionally related proteins, such as [[enzyme]]s for a specific [[metabolic pathway|pathway]], or genes that are co-regulated. High throughput experiments using [[expressed sequence tag]]s (ESTs) or [[DNA microarray]]s can be a powerful tool for [[genome annotation]]{{snd}}a general aspect of [[genomics]].
; [[Sequence analysis]]
:[[Sequence clustering]] is used to group homologous sequences into [[list of gene families|gene families]].<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Remm|first1=Maido|last2=Storm|first2=Christian E. V.|last3=Sonnhammer|first3=Erik L. L.|date=2001-12-14|title=Automatic clustering of orthologs and in-paralogs from pairwise species comparisons11Edited by F. Cohen|journal=Journal of Molecular Biology|volume=314|issue=5|pages=1041–1052|doi=10.1006/jmbi.2000.5197|issn=0022-2836|pmid=11743721}}</ref> This is a very important concept in [[bioinformatics]], and [[evolutionary biology]] in general. See evolution by [[gene duplication]].
; High-throughput [[genotype|genotyping]] platforms
:Clustering algorithms are used to automatically assign genotypes.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Botstein|first1=David|last2=Cox|first2=David R.|last3=Risch|first3=Neil|last4=Olshen|first4=Richard|last5=Curb|first5=David|last6=Dzau|first6=Victor J.|last7=Chen|first7=Yii-Der I.|last8=Hebert|first8=Joan|last9=Pesich|first9=Robert|date=2001-07-01|title=High-Throughput Genotyping with Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms|url=http://genome.cshlp.org/content/11/7/1262|journal=Genome Research|language=en|volume=11|issue=7|pages=1262–1268|doi=10.1101/gr.157801|issn=1088-9051|pmid=11435409|pmc=311112}}</ref>
; [[Human genetic clustering]]
:The similarity of genetic data is used in clustering to infer population structures.