Clustering of longitudinal data is used to explore common trends among subjects over time for a numeric measurement of interest. Various R packages have been introduced throughout the years for identifying clusters of longitudinal patterns, summarizing the variability in trajectories between subject in terms of one or more trends. We introduce the R package "latrend" as a framework for the unified application of methods for longitudinal clustering, enabling comparisons between methods with minimal coding. The package also serves as an interface to commonly used packages for clustering longitudinal data, including "dtwclust", "flexmix", "kml", "lcmm", "mclust", "mixAK", and "mixtools". This enables researchers to easily compare different approaches, implementations, and method specifications. Furthermore, researchers can build upon the standard tools provided by the framework to quickly implement new cluster methods, enabling rapid prototyping. We demonstrate the functionality and application of the latrend package on a synthetic dataset based on the therapy adherence patterns of patients with sleep apnea.

通过R包“latrend”作为框架，实现对纵向聚类方法的统一应用，使得研究人员能够轻松比较不同方法、实现和方法规范，并且能够快速推出新的聚类方法。

latrend：长期数据聚类框架