In the
clustering of biological information such as data from
microarray
A microarray is a multiplex lab-on-a-chip. Its purpose is to simultaneously detect the expression of thousands of genes from a sample (e.g. from a tissue). It is a two-dimensional array on a solid substrate—usually a glass slide or silicon t ...
experiments, the cophenetic similarity or cophenetic distance
[Sokal, R. R. and F. J. Rohlf. 1962. The comparison of dendrograms by objective methods. Taxon, 11:33-40] of two objects is a measure of how similar those two objects have to be in order to be grouped into the same cluster. The cophenetic distance between two objects is the height of the
dendrogram
A dendrogram is a diagram representing a tree. This diagrammatic representation is frequently used in different contexts:
* in hierarchical clustering, it illustrates the arrangement of the clusters produced by the corresponding analyses.
...
where the two branches that include the two objects merge into a single branch. Outside the context of a dendrogram, it is the distance between the largest two clusters that contain the two objects individually when they are merged into a single cluster that contains both.
See also
*
Cophenetic correlation In statistics, and especially in biostatistics, cophenetic correlation (more precisely, the cophenetic correlation coefficient) is a measure of how faithfully a dendrogram preserves the pairwise distances between the original unmodeled data points. ...
References
External links
University of Ohio lecture
Microarrays
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