This paper focuses on density-based clustering, particularly the Density Peak (DP) algorithm and the one based on density-connectivity DBSCAN; and proposes a new method which takes advantage of the individual strengths of these two methods to yield a density-based hierarchical clustering algorithm. Our investigation begins with formally defining the types of clusters DP and DBSCAN are designed to detect; and then identifies the kinds of distributions that DP and DBSCAN individually fail to detect all clusters in a dataset. These identified weaknesses inspire us to formally define a new kind of clusters and propose a new method called DC-HDP to overcome these weaknesses to identify clusters with arbitrary shapes and varied densities. In addition, the new method produces a richer clustering result in terms of hierarchy or dendrogram for better cluster structures understanding. Our empirical evaluation results show that DC-HDP produces the best clustering results on 14 datasets in comparison with 7 state-of-the-art clustering algorithms.
Many variants of DBSCAN have been attempted to overcome the weakness of detecting clusters with varied densities. OPTICS @cite_21 draws a reachability'' plot based on the @math -nearest neighbour distance. In the @math -axis of the plot, adjacent points follow close to each other such that point @math is the closest to @math in terms of the reachability distance'' The reachability-distance'' of object @math to object @math is the greater one between the core distance'' of @math and the distance between @math and @math . The core distance'' of @math is the minimum @math that makes @math a core'' object (the distance to its @math -nearest neighbour, @math ). . The reachability distance for each point is shown in @math -axis. Since clusters centre normally has a higher density or lower reachability distance than the cluster boundaries, each cluster is visible as a valley'' in this plot. Then a hierarchical method can be used to extract different clusters. The overall clustering performance depends on the hierarchical method employed on the reachability plot.
@cite_21
2160642098
Hierarchical clustering is common method used to determine clusters of similar data points in multi-dimensional spaces. @math algorithms, where @math is the number of points to cluster, have long been known for this problem. This paper discusses parallel algorithms to perform hierarchical clustering using various distance metrics. I describe @math time algorithms for clustering using the single link, average link, complete link, centroid, median, and minimum variance metrics on an @math node CRCW PRAM and @math algorithms for these metrics (except average link and complete link) on @math node butterfly networks or trees. Thus, optimal efficiency is achieved for a significant number of processors using these distance metrics. A general algorithm is given that can be used to perform clustering with the complete link and average link metrics on a butterfly. While this algorithm achieves optimal efficiency for the general class of metrics, it is not optimal for the specific cases of complete link and average link clustering. We consider @math -median clustering in finite metric spaces and @math -means clustering in Euclidean spaces, in the setting where @math is part of the input (not a constant). For the @math -means problem, show that if the optimal @math -means clustering of the input is more expensive than the optimal @math -means clustering by a factor of @math , then one can achieve a @math -approximation to the @math -means optimal in time polynomial in @math and @math by using a variant of Lloyd's algorithm. In this work we substantially improve this approximation guarantee. We show that given only the condition that the @math -means optimal is more expensive than the @math -means optimal by a factor @math for some constant @math , we can obtain a PTAS. In particular, under this assumption, for any @math we achieve a @math -approximation to the @math -means optimal in time polynomial in @math and @math , and exponential in @math and @math . We thus decouple the strength of the assumption from the quality of the approximation ratio. We also give a PTAS for the @math -median problem in finite metrics under the analogous assumption as well. For @math -means, we in addition give a randomized algorithm with improved running time of @math . Our technique also obtains a PTAS under the assumption of that all @math approximations are @math -close to a desired target clustering, in the case that all target clusters have size greater than @math and @math is constant. Note that the motivation of is that for many clustering problems, the objective function is only a proxy for the true goal of getting close to the target. From this perspective, our improvement is that for @math -means in Euclidean spaces we reduce the distance of the clustering found to the target from @math to @math when all target clusters are large, and for @math -median we improve the largeness'' condition needed in the work of to get exactly @math -close from @math to @math . Our results are based on a new notion of clustering stability. Given a metric space @math , @math , @math , and @math , a distribution over mappings @math is called a @math -sensitive hash family if any two points in @math at distance at most @math are mapped by @math to the same value with probability at least @math , and any two points at distance greater than @math are mapped by @math to the same value with probability at most @math . This notion was introduced by Indyk and Motwani in 1998 as the basis for an efficient approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm and has since been used extensively for this purpose. The performance of these algorithms is governed by the parameter @math , and constructing hash families with small @math automatically yields improved nearest neighbor algorithms. Here we show that for @math it is impossible to achieve @math . This almost matches the construction of Indyk and Motwani which achieves @math . Let @math be a tree space (or tree network) represented by a weighted tree with @math vertices, and @math be a set of @math stochastic points in @math , each of which has a fixed location with an independent existence probability. We investigate two fundamental problems under such a stochastic setting, the closest-pair problem and the nearest-neighbor search. For the former, we study the computation of the @math -threshold probability and the expectation of the closest-pair distance of a realization of @math . We propose the first algorithm to compute the @math -threshold probability in @math time for any given threshold @math , which immediately results in an @math -time algorithm for computing the expected closest-pair distance. Based on this, we further show that one can compute a @math -approximation for the expected closest-pair distance in @math time, by arguing that the expected closest-pair distance can be approximated via @math threshold probability queries. For the latter, we study the @math most-likely nearest-neighbor search ( @math -LNN) via a notion called @math most-likely Voronoi Diagram ( @math -LVD). We show that the size of the @math -LVD @math of @math on @math is bounded by @math if the existence probabilities of the points in @math are constant-far from 0. Furthermore, we establish an @math average-case upper bound for the size of @math , by regarding the existence probabilities as i.i.d. random variables drawn from some fixed distribution. Our results imply the existence of an LVD data structure which answers @math -LNN queries in @math time using average-case @math space, and worst-case @math space if the existence probabilities are constant-far from 0. Finally, we also give an @math -time algorithm to construct the LVD data structure.