Adjacency-Constrained Clustering of a Block-Diagonal Similarity Matrix
Implements a constrained version of hierarchical agglomerative clustering, in which each observation is associated to a position, and only adjacent clusters can be merged. Typical application fields in bioinformatics include Genome-Wide Association Studies or Hi-C data analysis, where the similarity between items is a decreasing function of their genomic distance. Taking advantage of this feature, the implemented algorithm is time and memory efficient. This algorithm is described in Ambroise et al (2019) <doi:10.1186/s13015-019-0157-4>.