A Data Distribution View of Clustering Algorithms

Author(s):  
Junjie Wu ◽  
Jian Chen ◽  
Hui Xiong

Cluster analysis (Jain & Dubes, 1988) provides insight into the data by dividing the objects into groups (clusters), such that objects in a cluster are more similar to each other than objects in other clusters. Cluster analysis has long played an important role in a wide variety of fields, such as psychology, bioinformatics, pattern recognition, information retrieval, machine learning, and data mining. Many clustering algorithms, such as K-means and Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean (UPGMA), have been wellestablished. A recent research focus on clustering analysis is to understand the strength and weakness of various clustering algorithms with respect to data factors. Indeed, people have identified some data characteristics that may strongly affect clustering analysis including high dimensionality and sparseness, the large size, noise, types of attributes and data sets, and scales of attributes (Tan, Steinbach, & Kumar, 2005). However, further investigation is expected to reveal whether and how the data distributions can have the impact on the performance of clustering algorithms. Along this line, we study clustering algorithms by answering three questions: 1. What are the systematic differences between the distributions of the resultant clusters by different clustering algorithms? 2. How can the distribution of the “true” cluster sizes make impact on the performances of clustering algorithms? 3. How to choose an appropriate clustering algorithm in practice? The answers to these questions can guide us for the better understanding and the use of clustering methods. This is noteworthy, since 1) in theory, people seldom realized that there are strong relationships between the clustering algorithms and the cluster size distributions, and 2) in practice, how to choose an appropriate clustering algorithm is still a challenging task, especially after an algorithm boom in data mining area. This chapter thus tries to fill this void initially. To this end, we carefully select two widely used categories of clustering algorithms, i.e., K-means and Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering (AHC), as the representative algorithms for illustration. In the chapter, we first show that K-means tends to generate the clusters with a relatively uniform distribution on the cluster sizes. Then we demonstrate that UPGMA, one of the robust AHC methods, acts in an opposite way to K-means; that is, UPGMA tends to generate the clusters with high variation on the cluster sizes. Indeed, the experimental results indicate that the variations of the resultant cluster sizes by K-means and UPGMA, measured by the Coefficient of Variation (CV), are in the specific intervals, say [0.3, 1.0] and [1.0, 2.5] respectively. Finally, we put together K-means and UPGMA for a further comparison, and propose some rules for the better choice of the clustering schemes from the data distribution point of view.

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (10) ◽  
pp. 43-50
Author(s):  
Truong et al. ◽  

Clustering is a fundamental technique in data mining and machine learning. Recently, many researchers are interested in the problem of clustering categorical data and several new approaches have been proposed. One of the successful and pioneering clustering algorithms is the Minimum-Minimum Roughness algorithm (MMR) which is a top-down hierarchical clustering algorithm and can handle the uncertainty in clustering categorical data. However, MMR tends to choose the category with less value leaf node with more objects, leading to undesirable clustering results. To overcome such shortcomings, this paper proposes an improved version of the MMR algorithm for clustering categorical data, called IMMR (Improved Minimum-Minimum Roughness). Experimental results on actual data sets taken from UCI show that the IMMR algorithm outperforms MMR in clustering categorical data.


2014 ◽  
Vol 926-930 ◽  
pp. 3608-3611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yi Fan Zhang ◽  
Yong Tao Qian ◽  
Tai Yu Liu ◽  
Shu Yan Wu

In this paper, first introduce data mining knowledge then focuses on the clustering analysis algorithms, including classification clustering algorithm, and each classification typical cluster analysis algorithms, including the formal description of each algorithm as well as the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm also has a more detailed description. Then carefully introduce data mining algorithm on the basis of cluster analysis. And using cohesion based clustering algorithm with DBSCAN algorithm and clustering in consumer spending in two-dimensional space, 2,000 data points for each area, and get a reasonable clustering results, resulting in hierarchical clustering results valuable information, so as to realize the practical application of the algorithm and clustering analysis theory combined.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Yanping Xu ◽  
Sen Xu

Clustering analysis plays a very important role in the field of data mining, image segmentation and pattern recognition. The method of cluster analysis is introduced to analyze NetEYun music data. In addition, different types of music data are clustered to find the commonness among the same kind of music. A music data-oriented clustering analysis method is proposed: Firstly, the audio beat period is calculated by reading the audio file data, and the emotional features of the audio are extracted; Secondly, the audio beat period is calculated by Fourier transform. Finally, a clustering algorithm is designed to obtain the clustering results of music data.


2015 ◽  
pp. 125-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. V. Goncharenko

In this article we proposed a new method of non-hierarchical cluster analysis using k-nearest-neighbor graph and discussed it with respect to vegetation classification. The method of k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classification was originally developed in 1951 (Fix, Hodges, 1951). Later a term “k-NN graph” and a few algorithms of k-NN clustering appeared (Cover, Hart, 1967; Brito et al., 1997). In biology k-NN is used in analysis of protein structures and genome sequences. Most of k-NN clustering algorithms build «excessive» graph firstly, so called hypergraph, and then truncate it to subgraphs, just partitioning and coarsening hypergraph. We developed other strategy, the “upward” clustering in forming (assembling consequentially) one cluster after the other. Until today graph-based cluster analysis has not been considered concerning classification of vegetation datasets.


Author(s):  
Yuancheng Li ◽  
Yaqi Cui ◽  
Xiaolong Zhang

Background: Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) for the smart grid is growing rapidly which results in the exponential growth of data collected and transmitted in the device. By clustering this data, it can give the electricity company a better understanding of the personalized and differentiated needs of the user. Objective: The existing clustering algorithms for processing data generally have some problems, such as insufficient data utilization, high computational complexity and low accuracy of behavior recognition. Methods: In order to improve the clustering accuracy, this paper proposes a new clustering method based on the electrical behavior of the user. Starting with the analysis of user load characteristics, the user electricity data samples were constructed. The daily load characteristic curve was extracted through improved extreme learning machine clustering algorithm and effective index criteria. Moreover, clustering analysis was carried out for different users from industrial areas, commercial areas and residential areas. The improved extreme learning machine algorithm, also called Unsupervised Extreme Learning Machine (US-ELM), is an extension and improvement of the original Extreme Learning Machine (ELM), which realizes the unsupervised clustering task on the basis of the original ELM. Results: Four different data sets have been experimented and compared with other commonly used clustering algorithms by MATLAB programming. The experimental results show that the US-ELM algorithm has higher accuracy in processing power data. Conclusion: The unsupervised ELM algorithm can greatly reduce the time consumption and improve the effectiveness of clustering.


2011 ◽  
pp. 24-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicoleta Rogovschi ◽  
Mustapha Lebbah ◽  
Younès Bennani

Most traditional clustering algorithms are limited to handle data sets that contain either continuous or categorical variables. However data sets with mixed types of variables are commonly used in data mining field. In this paper we introduce a weighted self-organizing map for clustering, analysis and visualization mixed data (continuous/binary). The learning of weights and prototypes is done in a simultaneous manner assuring an optimized data clustering. More variables has a high weight, more the clustering algorithm will take into account the informations transmitted by these variables. The learning of these topological maps is combined with a weighting process of different variables by computing weights which influence the quality of clustering. We illustrate the power of this method with data sets taken from a public data set repository: a handwritten digit data set, Zoo data set and other three mixed data sets. The results show a good quality of the topological ordering and homogenous clustering.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lopamudra Dey ◽  
Sanjay Chakraborty

“Clustering” the significance and application of this technique is spread over various fields. Clustering is an unsupervised process in data mining, that is why the proper evaluation of the results and measuring the compactness and separability of the clusters are important issues. The procedure of evaluating the results of a clustering algorithm is known as cluster validity measure. Different types of indexes are used to solve different types of problems and indices selection depends on the kind of available data. This paper first proposes Canonical PSO based K-means clustering algorithm and also analyses some important clustering indices (intercluster, intracluster) and then evaluates the effects of those indices on real-time air pollution database, wholesale customer, wine, and vehicle datasets using typical K-means, Canonical PSO based K-means, simple PSO based K-means, DBSCAN, and Hierarchical clustering algorithms. This paper also describes the nature of the clusters and finally compares the performances of these clustering algorithms according to the validity assessment. It also defines which algorithm will be more desirable among all these algorithms to make proper compact clusters on this particular real life datasets. It actually deals with the behaviour of these clustering algorithms with respect to validation indexes and represents their results of evaluation in terms of mathematical and graphical forms.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Angeliki Koutsimpela ◽  
Konstantinos D. Koutroumbas

Several well known clustering algorithms have their own online counterparts, in order to deal effectively with the big data issue, as well as with the case where the data become available in a streaming fashion. However, very few of them follow the stochastic gradient descent philosophy, despite the fact that the latter enjoys certain practical advantages (such as the possibility of (a) running faster than their batch processing counterparts and (b) escaping from local minima of the associated cost function), while, in addition, strong theoretical convergence results have been established for it. In this paper a novel stochastic gradient descent possibilistic clustering algorithm, called O- PCM 2 is introduced. The algorithm is presented in detail and it is rigorously proved that the gradient of the associated cost function tends to zero in the L 2 sense, based on general convergence results established for the family of the stochastic gradient descent algorithms. Furthermore, an additional discussion is provided on the nature of the points where the algorithm may converge. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is tested against other related algorithms, on the basis of both synthetic and real data sets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Peng Zhang ◽  
Kun She

The target of the clustering analysis is to group a set of data points into several clusters based on the similarity or distance. The similarity or distance is usually a scalar used in numerous traditional clustering algorithms. Nevertheless, a vector, such as data gravitational force, contains more information than a scalar and can be applied in clustering analysis to promote clustering performance. Therefore, this paper proposes a three-stage hierarchical clustering approach called GHC, which takes advantage of the vector characteristic of data gravitational force inspired by the law of universal gravitation. In the first stage, a sparse gravitational graph is constructed based on the top k data gravitations between each data point and its neighbors in the local region. Then the sparse graph is partitioned into many subgraphs by the gravitational influence coefficient. In the last stage, the satisfactory clustering result is obtained by merging these subgraphs iteratively by using a new linkage criterion. To demonstrate the performance of GHC algorithm, the experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets are conducted, and the results show that the GHC algorithm achieves better performance than the other existing clustering algorithms.


Author(s):  
Ting Xie ◽  
Taiping Zhang

As a powerful unsupervised learning technique, clustering is the fundamental task of big data analysis. However, many traditional clustering algorithms for big data that is a collection of high dimension, sparse and noise data do not perform well both in terms of computational efficiency and clustering accuracy. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents Feature K-means clustering model on the feature space of big data and introduces its fast algorithm based on Alternating Direction Multiplier Method (ADMM). We show the equivalence of the Feature K-means model in the original space and the feature space and prove the convergence of its iterative algorithm. Computationally, we compare the Feature K-means with Spherical K-means and Kernel K-means on several benchmark data sets, including artificial data and four face databases. Experiments show that the proposed approach is comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithm in big data clustering.


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