DMCM: a Data-adaptive Mutation Clustering Method to identify cancer-related mutation clusters

Functional somatic mutations within coding amino acid sequences confer growth advantage in pathogenic process. Most existing methods for identifying cancer-related mutations focus on the single amino acid or the entire gene level. However, gain-of-function mutations often cluster in specific protein regions instead of existing independently in the amino acid sequences. Some approaches for identifying mutation clusters with mutation density on amino acid chain have been proposed recently. But their performance in identification of mutation clusters remains to be improved.