There have been many new advances in the development of improved clustering methods for microarray data analysis, but traditional clustering methods are still often used in genomic data analysis, which maY be more due to their conceptual simplicity and their broad usability in commercial software packages than to their intrinsic merits. Thus, it is crucial to assess the performance of each existing method through a comprehensive comparative analysis so as to provide informed guidelines on choosing clustering methods. In this study, we investigated existing clustering methods applied to microarray data in various real scenarios. To this end, we focused on how the various methods differ, and why a particular method does not perform well. We applied both internal and external validation methods to the following eight clustering methods using various simulated data sets and real microarray data sets.