Bayesian Clustering of Prostate Cancer Patients by Using a Latent Class Poisson Model

Latent Class model has been considered recently by many researchers and practitioners as a tool for identifying heterogeneous segments or groups in a population, and grouping objects into the segments. In this paper we consider data on prostate cancer patients from Korean National Cancer Institute and propose a method for grouping prostate cancer patients by using latent class Poisson model. A Bayesian approach equipped with a Markov chain Monte Carlo method is used to overcome the limit of classical likelihood approaches. Advantages of the proposed Bayesian method are easy estimation of parameters with their standard errors, segmentation of objects into groups, and provision of uncertainty measures for the segmentation. In addition, we provide a method to determine an appropriate number of segments for the given data so that the method automatically chooses the number of segments and partitions objects into heterogeneous segments.