Entropy Based Clustering of Viral Sequences

Clustering viral sequences allows us to characterize the composition and structure of intrahost and interhost viral populations, which play a crucial role in disease progression and epidemic spread. In this paper we propose and validate a new entropy based method for clustering aligned viral sequences considered as categorical data. The method finds a homogeneous clustering by minimizing information entropy rather than distance between sequences in the same cluster. We have applied our entropy based clustering method to SARS-CoV-2 viral sequencing data. We report the information content extracted from the sequences by entropy based clustering. Our method converges to similar minimum-entropy clusterings across different runs and limited permutations of data. We also show that a parallelized version of our tool is scalable to very large SARS-CoV-2 datasets.