In systems biomedicine, an experimenter encounters different potential
sources of variation in data such as individual samples, multiple experimental
conditions, and multi-variable network-level responses. In multiparametric
cytometry, which is often used for analyzing patient samples, such issues are
critical. While computational methods can identify cell populations in
individual samples, without the ability to automatically match them across
samples, it is difficult to compare and characterize the populations in typical
experiments, such as those responding to various stimulations or distinctive of
particular patients or time-points, especially when there are many samples.
Joint Clustering and Matching (JCM) is a multi-level framework for simultaneous
modeling and registration of populations across a cohort. JCM models every
population with a robust multivariate probability distribution. Simultaneously,
JCM fits a random-effects model to construct an overall batch template -- used
for registering populations across samples, and classifying new samples. By
tackling systems-level variation, JCM supports practical biomedical
applications involving large cohorts
