Time-Varying Clusters in Large-Scale Flow Cytometry

Flow cytometers measure the optical properties of particles to classify microbes. Recent innovations have allowed oceanographers to collect flow cytometry data continuously during research cruises, leading to an explosion of data and new challenges for the classification task. The massive scale, time-varying underlying populations, and noisy measurements motivate the development of new classification methods. We describe the problem, the data, and some preliminary results demonstrating the difficulty with conventional methods.