• The Korean Journal of Applied Statistics
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.331-348
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• 2019

Understanding the tumor heterogeneity due to differences in the growth pattern of metastatic tumors and rate of change is important for understanding the sensitivity of tumor cells to drugs and finding appropriate therapies. It is often possible to test for differences in population means using t-test or ANOVA when the group of N samples is distinct. However, these statistical methods can not be used unless the groups are distinguished as the data covered in this paper. Statistical methods have been studied to test heterogeneity between samples. The minimum combination t-test method is one of them. In this paper, we propose a maximum combinatorial t-test method that takes into account combinations that bisect data at different ratios. Also we propose a method based on the idea that examining the heterogeneity of a sample is equivalent to testing whether the number of optimal clusters is one in the cluster analysis. We verified that the proposed methods, maximum combination t-test method and gap statistic, have better type-I error and power than the previously proposed method based on simulation study and obtained the results through real data analysis.