Robust projected clustering

Projected clustering partitions a data set into several disjoint clusters, plus outliers, so that each cluster exists in a subspace. Subspace clustering enumerates clusters of objects in all subspaces of a data set, and it tends to produce many overlapping clusters. Such algorithms have been extensively studied for numerical data, but only a few have been proposed for categorical data. Typical drawbacks of existing projected and subspace clustering algorithms for numerical or categorical data are that they rely on parameters whose appropriate values are difficult to set appropriately or that they are unable to identify projected clusters with few relevant attributes. We present P3C, a robust algorithm for projected clustering that can effectively discover projected clusters in the data while minimizing the number of required parameters. P3C does not need the number of projected clusters as input, and can discover, under very general conditions, the true number of projected clusters. P3C is effective in detecting very low-dimensional projected clusters embedded in high dimensional spaces. P3C positions itself between projected and subspace clustering in that it can compute both disjoint or overlapping clusters. P3C is the first projected clustering algorithm for both numerical and categorical data.     

基于相对密度和熵的混合属性聚类融合算法

混合属性聚类是近年来的研究热点,对于混合属性数据的聚类算法要求处理好数值属性以及分类属性,而现存许多算法没有很好得平衡两种属性,以至于得不到令人满意的聚类结果.针对混合属性,在此提出一种基于交集的聚类融合算法,算法单独用基于相对密度的算法处理数值属性,基于信息熵的算法处理分类属性,然后通过基于交集的融合算法融合两个聚类成员,最终得到聚类结果.算法在UCI数据集Zoo上进行验证,与现存k-prototypes与EM算法进行了比较,在聚类的正确率上都优于k-prototypes与EM算法,还讨论了融合算法中交集元素比的取值对算法结果的影响.     

Extensions to the k-Means Algorithm for Clustering Large Data Sets with Categorical Values

The k-means algorithm is well known for its efficiency in clustering large data sets. However, working only on numeric values prohibits it from being used to cluster real world data containing categorical values. In this paper we present two algorithms which extend the k-means algorithm to categorical domains and domains with mixed numeric and categorical values. The k-modes algorithm uses a simple matching dissimilarity measure to deal with categorical objects, replaces the means of clusters with modes, and uses a frequency-based method to update modes in the clustering process to minimise the clustering cost function. With these extensions the k-modes algorithm enables the clustering of categorical data in a fashion similar to k-means. The k-prototypes algorithm, through the definition of a combined dissimilarity measure, further integrates the k-means and k-modes algorithms to allow for clustering objects described by mixed numeric and categorical attributes. We use the well known soybean disease and credit approval data sets to demonstrate the clustering performance of the two algorithms. Our experiments on two real world data sets with half a million objects each show that the two algorithms are efficient when clustering large data sets, which is critical to data mining applications.     

A novel attribute weighting algorithm for clustering high-dimensional categorical data

Due to data sparseness and attribute redundancy in high-dimensional data, clusters of objects often exist in subspaces rather than in the entire space. To effectively address this issue, this paper presents a new optimization algorithm for clustering high-dimensional categorical data, which is an extension of the k-modes clustering algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, a novel weighting technique for categorical data is developed to calculate two weights for each attribute (or dimension) in each cluster and use the weight values to identify the subsets of important attributes that categorize different clusters. The convergence of the algorithm under an optimization framework is proved. The performance and scalability of the algorithm is evaluated experimentally on both synthetic and real data sets. The experimental studies show that the proposed algorithm is effective in clustering categorical data sets and also scalable to large data sets owning to its linear time complexity with respect to the number of data objects, attributes or clusters.     

A k-means type clustering algorithm for subspace clustering of mixed numeric and categorical datasets

Almost all subspace clustering algorithms proposed so far are designed for numeric datasets. In this paper, we present a k-means type clustering algorithm that finds clusters in data subspaces in mixed numeric and categorical datasets. In this method, we compute attributes contribution to different clusters. We propose a new cost function for a k-means type algorithm. One of the advantages of this algorithm is its complexity which is linear with respect to the number of the data points. This algorithm is also useful in describing the cluster formation in terms of attributes contribution to different clusters. The algorithm is tested on various synthetic and real datasets to show its effectiveness. The clustering results are explained by using attributes weights in the clusters. The clustering results are also compared with published results.     

A semi-supervised regression model for mixed numerical and categorical variables

In this paper, we develop a semi-supervised regression algorithm to analyze data sets which contain both categorical and numerical attributes. This algorithm partitions the data sets into several clusters and at the same time fits a multivariate regression model to each cluster. This framework allows one to incorporate both multivariate regression models for numerical variables (supervised learning methods) and k-mode clustering algorithms for categorical variables (unsupervised learning methods). The estimates of regression models and k-mode parameters can be obtained simultaneously by minimizing a function which is the weighted sum of the least-square errors in the multivariate regression models and the dissimilarity measures among the categorical variables. Both synthetic and real data sets are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

A fuzzy c-means-type algorithm for clustering of data with mixed numeric and categorical attributes employing a probabilistic dissimilarity functional

Gath–Geva (GG) algorithm is one of the most popular methodologies for fuzzy c-means (FCM)-type clustering of data comprising numeric attributes; it is based on the assumption of data deriving from clusters of Gaussian form, a much more flexible construction compared to the spherical clusters assumption of the original FCM. In this paper, we introduce an extension of the GG algorithm to allow for the effective handling of data with mixed numeric and categorical attributes. Traditionally, fuzzy clustering of such data is conducted by means of the fuzzy k-prototypes algorithm, which merely consists in the execution of the original FCM algorithm using a different dissimilarity functional, suitable for attributes with mixed numeric and categorical attributes. On the contrary, in this work we provide a novel FCM-type algorithm employing a fully probabilistic dissimilarity functional for handling data with mixed-type attributes. Our approach utilizes a fuzzy objective function regularized by Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence information, and is formulated on the basis of a set of probabilistic assumptions regarding the form of the derived clusters. We evaluate the efficacy of the proposed approach using benchmark data, and we compare it with competing fuzzy and non-fuzzy clustering algorithms.     

一种有效的用于数据挖掘的动态概念聚类算法

概念聚类适用于领域知识不完整或领域知识缺乏时的数据挖掘任务.定义了一种基于语义的距离判定函数,结合领域知识对连续属性值进行概念化处理,对于用分类属性和数值属性混合描述数据对象的情况,提出了一种动态概念聚类算法DDCA(domain-baseddynamicclusteringalgorithm).该算法能够自动确定聚类数目,依据聚类内部属性值的频繁程度修正聚类中心,通过概念归纳处理,用概念合取表达式解释聚类输出.研究表明,基于语义距离判定函数和基于领域知识的动态概念聚类的算法DDCA是有效的.     

混合属性数据k-prototypes聚类算法

在现实世界中经常遇到混合数值属性和分类属性的数据, k-prototypes是聚类该类型数据的主要算法之一。针对现有混合属性聚类算法的不足,提出一种基于分布式质心和新差异测度的改进的 k-prototypes 算法。在新算法中,首先引入分布式质心来表示簇中的分类属性的簇中心,然后结合均值和分布式质心来表示混合属性的簇中心,并提出一种新的差异测度来计算数据对象与簇中心的距离,新差异测度考虑了不同属性在聚类过程中的重要性。在三个真实数据集上的仿真实验表明,与传统的聚类算法相比,本文算法的聚类精度要优于传统的聚类算法,从而验证了本文算法的有效性。     

Hierarchical clustering of mixed data based on distance hierarchy

Data clustering is an important data mining technique which partitions data according to some similarity criterion. Abundant algorithms have been proposed for clustering numerical data and some recent research tackles the problem of clustering categorical or mixed data. Unlike the subtraction scheme used for numerical attributes, there is no standard for measuring distance between categorical values. In this article, we propose a distance representation scheme, distance hierarchy, which facilitates expressing the similarity between categorical values and also unifies distance measuring of numerical and categorical values. We then apply the scheme to mixed data clustering, in particular, to integrate with a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Consequently, this integrated approach can uniformly handle numerical data and categorical data, and also enables one to take the similarity between categorical values into consideration. Experimental results show that the proposed approach produces better clustering results than conventional clustering algorithms when categorical attributes are present and their values have different degree of similarity.     

On clustering massive text and categorical data streams

In this paper, we will study the data stream clustering problem in the context of text and categorical data domains. While the clustering problem has been studied recently for numeric data streams, the problems of text and categorical data present different challenges because of the large and un-ordered nature of the corresponding attributes. Therefore, we will propose algorithms for text and categorical data stream clustering. We will propose a condensation based approach for stream clustering which summarizes the stream into a number of fine grained cluster droplets. These summarized droplets can be used in conjunction with a variety of user queries to construct the clusters for different input parameters. Thus, this provides an online analytical processing approach to stream clustering. We also study the problem of detecting noisy and outlier records in real time. We will test the approach for a number of real and synthetic data sets, and show the effectiveness of the method over the baseline OSKM algorithm for stream clustering.     

K-Harmonic means type clustering algorithm for mixed datasets

K-means type clustering algorithms for mixed data that consists of numeric and categorical attributes suffer from cluster center initialization problem. The final clustering results depend upon the initial cluster centers. Random cluster center initialization is a popular initialization technique. However, clustering results are not consistent with different cluster center initializations. K-Harmonic means clustering algorithm tries to overcome this problem for pure numeric data. In this paper, we extend the K-Harmonic means clustering algorithm for mixed datasets. We propose a definition for a cluster center and a distance measure. These cluster centers and the distance measure are used with the cost function of K-Harmonic means clustering algorithm in the proposed algorithm. Experiments were carried out with pure categorical datasets and mixed datasets. Results suggest that the proposed clustering algorithm is quite insensitive to the cluster center initialization problem. Comparative studies with other clustering algorithms show that the proposed algorithm produce better clustering results.     

“Best K”: critical clustering structures in categorical datasets

The demand on cluster analysis for categorical data continues to grow over the last decade. A well-known problem in categorical clustering is to determine the best K number of clusters. Although several categorical clustering algorithms have been developed, surprisingly, none has satisfactorily addressed the problem of best K for categorical clustering. Since categorical data does not have an inherent distance function as the similarity measure, traditional cluster validation techniques based on geometric shapes and density distributions are not appropriate for categorical data. In this paper, we study the entropy property between the clustering results of categorical data with different K number of clusters, and propose the BKPlot method to address the three important cluster validation problems: (1) How can we determine whether there is significant clustering structure in a categorical dataset? (2) If there is significant clustering structure, what is the set of candidate “best Ks”? (3) If the dataset is large, how can we efficiently and reliably determine the best Ks?     

An initialization method to simultaneously find initial cluster centers and the number of clusters for clustering categorical data

The leading partitional clustering technique, k-modes, is one of the most computationally efficient clustering methods for categorical data. However, in the k-modes-type algorithms, the performance of their clustering depends on initial cluster centers and the number of clusters needs be known or given in advance. This paper proposes a novel initialization method for categorical data which is implemented to the k-modes-type algorithms. The proposed method can not only obtain the good initial cluster centers but also provide a criterion to find candidates for the number of clusters. The performance and scalability of the proposed method has been studied on real data sets. The experimental results illustrate that the proposed method is effective and can be applied to large data sets for its linear time complexity with respect to the number of data points.     

动态的模糊K-Modes初始化算法

模糊-Modes聚类算法针对分类属性的数据进行聚类，使用爬山法来寻找最优解，因此该算法对初始值较为敏感。为了克服该缺点，提出一种动态的模糊K—Modes初始化算法，该方法能够自动确定聚类数目，以及对应的聚类中心；而且能够应用于数值属性和分类属性相混合的数据集。该初始化算法可以有效地克服模糊K—Modes算法对初值的敏感性。实验的结果表明了该初始化算法的可行性和有效性。     

Geometrical codification for clustering mixed categorical and numerical databases

This paper presents an alternative to cluster mixed databases. The main idea is to propose a general method to cluster mixed data sets, which is not very complex and still can reach similar levels of performance of some good algorithms. The proposed approach is based on codifying the categorical attributes and use a numerical clustering algorithm on the resulting database. The codification proposed is based on polar or spherical coordinates, it is easy to understand and to apply, the increment in the length of the input matrix is not excessively large, and the codification error can be determined for each case. The proposed codification combined with the well known k-means algorithm showed a very good performance in different benchmarks and has been compared with both, other codifications and other mixed clustering algorithms, showing a better or comparable performance in all cases.     

混合属性数据集的聚类边界检测技术

为了满足数据分析中获取含有混合属性的数据集聚类的边界需求, 提出一种混合属性数据集的聚类边界检测算法(BERGE). 该算法利用模糊聚类隶属度定义边界因子以识别候选边界集, 然后运用证据积累的思想提取聚类的边界. 在综合数据集和真实数据集上的实验结果表明, BERGE 算法能有效地检测混合属性数据集、数值属性数据集以及分类属性数据集的聚类边界, 与现有同类算法相比具有更高的精度.     

一种适用于混合型分类数据的聚类算法

传统的K-modes算法采用简单的属性匹配方式计算同一属性下不同属性值的距离，并且计算样本距离时令所有属性权重相等。在此基础上，综合考虑有序型分类数据中属性值的顺序关系、无序型分类数据中不同属性值之间的相似性以及各属性之间的关系等，提出一种更加适用于混合型分类数据的改进聚类算法，该算法对无序型分类数据和有序型分类数据采用不同的距离度量，并且用平均熵赋予相应的权重。实验结果表明，改进算法在人工数据集和真实数据集上均有比K-modes算法及其改进算法更好的聚类效果。     

类属数据的贝叶斯聚类算法

针对类属型数据聚类中对象间距离函数定义的困难问题,提出一种基于贝叶斯概率估计的类属数据聚类算法。首先,提出一种属性加权的概率模型,在这个模型中每个类属属性被赋予一个反映其重要性的权重;其次,经过贝叶斯公式的变换,定义了基于最大似然估计的聚类优化目标函数,并提出了一种基于划分的聚类算法,该算法不再依赖于对象间的距离,而是根据对象与数据集划分间的加权似然进行聚类;第三,推导了计算属性权重的表达式,得出了类属型属性权重与其符号分布的信息熵成反比的结论。在实际数据和合成数据集上进行了实验,结果表明,与基于距离的现有聚类算法相比,所提算法提高了聚类精度,特别是在生物信息学数据上取得了5%~48%的提升幅度,并可以获得有实际意义的属性加权结果。     

针对混合型分类数据改进的[K]-modes算法距离公式

传统[K]-modes算法在分类属性聚类中有着广泛的应用,但是传统算法并不区分有序分类属性与无序分类属性。在区分这两种属性的基础上,提出了一种新的距离公式,并优化了算法流程。基于无序分类属性的距离数值,确定了有序分类属性相邻属性值之间距离数值的合理范围。借助有序分类属性蕴含的顺序关系,构建了有序分类属性的距离公式。计算样本点与质心距离之时,引入了簇内各属性值的比例作为总体距离公式的重要参数。综上,新的距离公式良好地刻画了有序分类属性的距离,并且平衡了两种不同分类属性距离公式之间的差异性。实验结果表明,提出的改进算法和距离公式在UCI真实数据集上比原始[K]-modes算法及其改进算法均有显著的效果。