falcon-clust

Large-scale tandem mass spectrum clustering using fast nearest neighbor searching. The falcon spectrum clustering tool uses advanced algorithmic techniques for highly efficient processing of millions of MS/MS spectra. First, high-resolution spectra are binned and converted to low-dimensional vectors using feature hashing. Next, the spectrum vectors are used to construct nearest neighbor indexes for fast similarity searching. The nearest neighbor indexes are used to efficiently compute a sparse pairwise distance matrix without having to exhaustively compare all spectra to each other. Finally, density-based clustering is performed to group similar spectra into clusters.