Clustering data by reordering them

Abstract

Grouping elements into families to analyse them separately is a standard analysis procedure in many areas of sciences. We propose herein a new algorithm based on the simple idea that members from a family look like each other, and don't resemble elements foreign to the family. After reordering the data according to the distance between elements, the analysis is automatically performed with easily-understandable parameters. Noise is explicitly taken into account to deal with the variety of problems of a data-driven world. We applied the algorithm to sort biomolecules conformations, gene sequences, cells, images, and experimental conditions.