Post-clustering Inference under Dependence

Recent work by Gao et al. (2024) has laid the foundations for post-clustering inference, establishing a theoretical framework allowing to test for differences between means of estimated clusters. Additionally, they studied the estimation of unknown parameters while controlling the selective type I error. However, their theory was developed for independent observations identically distributed as p-dimensional Gaussian variables, where the parameter estimation could only be performed for spherical covariance matrices. Here, we aim at extending this framework to a more convenient scenario for practical applications, where arbitrary dependence structures between observations and features are allowed. We establish sufficient conditions for extending the setting presented by Gao et al. (2024) to the general dependence framework. Moreover, we assess theoretical conditions allowing the compatible estimation of a covariance matrix. The theory is developed for hierarchical agglomerative clustering algorithms with several types of linkages, and for the k-means algorithm. We illustrate our method with synthetic data and real data of protein structures.