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No abstract

Abstract. Normal mixture models are being increasingly used as a way of clustering sets of continuous multivariate data. They provide a probabilistic (soft) clustering of the data in terms of their fitted posterior probabilities of membership of the mixture components corresponding to the clusters. An outright (hard) clustering can be subsequently obtained by assigning each observation to the component to which it has the highest fitted posterior probability of belonging. However, outliers in the data can affect the estimates of the parameters in the normal component densities, and hence the implied clustering. A more robust approach is to fit mixtures of multivariate t~distributions, which have longer tails than the normal components. The expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm can be used to fit mixtures of t-distributions by maximum likelihood. The application of this model to provide a robust approach to clustering is illustrated on a real data set. It is demonstrated how the use of t-components provides less extreme estimates of the posterior probabilities of cluster membership.

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Flow cytometric analysis allows rapid single cell interrogation of surface and intracellular determinants by measuring fluorescence intensity of fluorophore-conjugated reagents. The availability of new platforms, allowing detection of increasing numbers of cell surface markers, has challenged the traditional technique of identifying cell populations by manual gating and resulted in a growing need for the development of automated, high-dimensional analytical methods. We present a direct multivariate finite mixture modeling approach, using skew and heavy-tailed distributions, to address the complexities of flow cytometric analysis and to deal with high-dimensional cytometric data without the need for projection or transformation. We demonstrate its ability to detect rare populations, to model robustly in the presence of outliers and skew, and to perform the critical task of matching cell populations across samples that enables downstream analysis. This advance will facilitate the application of flow cytometry to new, complex biological and clinical problems.finite mixture model ͉ flow cytometry ͉ multivariate skew distribution F low cytometry transformed clinical immunology and hematology over 2 decades ago by allowing the rapid interrogation of cell surface determinants and, more recently, by enabling the analysis of intracellular events using fluorophore-conjugated antibodies or markers. Although flow cytometry initially allowed the investigation of only a single fluorophore, recent advances allow close to 20 parallel channels for monitoring different determinants (1-4). These advances have now surpassed our ability to interpret manually the resulting high-dimensional data and have led to growing interest and recent activity in the development of new computational tools and approaches (5-8).The difficulty in data analysis arises from the traditional technique of identifying discrete cell populations by manual gating, which is a labor-intensive process and varies by user experience. The initial computational packages for flow cytometric analyses focused largely on different preprocessing tasks such as data acquisition, normalization, and live cell gating. Besides visualization and transformation of flow cytometric data, useful tools such as Flowjo (www.flowjo.com) and the packages in BioConductor (www.bioconductor.org) (such as prada, flowCore, flowViz, flowUtils, and rflowcyt) allow some form of software-assisted gating and extraction of populations of interest. The operator subjectively demarcates a cell population while moving through successive 2-or 3-dimensional projections of the data. This process limits the reproducibility of data processing. A more fundamental problem is that this lower dimensional visualization hinders the identification of higher-dimensional features. Furthermore, current methods extract only a limited number of sample parameters, such as the mean fluorescence intensity of a cell population, which can lead to loss of critical information in defining the properties of a cell population....