A robust and fast clustering method for amplicon-based studies. This is an experimental python version of swarm. The objective of that version is to identify the fastest way to perform the clustering when the number of differences d between amplicons is set to 1. That d parameters is set to 1 by default in the official swarm version, as it yields high-resolution clustering results, and as datasets grow in size, using d = 1 is arguably the best decision.

With current clustering algorithms (including swarm), computation complexity is quadratic. Multiplying by 10 the size of the dataset increases by a factor 100 the computation time.

In the approach taken by swarm, using a fixed d = 1 value allows a radical change in the algorithm design (while of course remaining exact). That new algorithm, implemented in the python script presented here, has a fantastic property: it has a linear computation complexity. Increasing the dataset 10 times only increases the computation time by a factor of 10. A major change in scalability.

To give some perspective, the monothreaded python script is already as fast as the C++ multithreaded "vanilla" implementation of swarm on mid-size amplicon datasets (appr. 1 million unique amplicons). The python script is more than 10 times faster on large amplicon datasets (32 million unique amplicons). On an extremely large dataset (154 million unique amplicons!), the script takes only 6 days to run, where the C++ vanilla implementation of swarm would take several months on a 16-cores computer.

Early tests with a C version of the key-function of the new algorithm show a 10 times speed-up. We can confidently estimate that a smart C/C++ re-implementation of the algorithm will bring another very significant speed-up.

In conclusion, with that new swarm algorithm, fast, exact and accurate partitioning of extremely large datasets, intractable with current clustering methods suddenly becomes an easy computation task.

Tested with python 2.7.3

To get basic usage and help, use the following command:

python swarm.py -h