The current study was designed to address the limitations of prior studies, including our own. This effort consisted in revising the statistical analytic approach to include a variable selection step that identifies the characteristic features of opioid use and related behaviors that are most likely to be heritable to guide the creation of clusters. The analytic approach also replaced the multiple k-means method with a number of random initiations by the k-medoids method with a deterministic initiation, thus ensuring the replicability of the resultant clusters.
