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.     

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。     

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.     

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.     

Determining the number of clusters using information entropy for mixed data

In cluster analysis, one of the most challenging and difficult problems is the determination of the number of clusters in a data set, which is a basic input parameter for most clustering algorithms. To solve this problem, many algorithms have been proposed for either numerical or categorical data sets. However, these algorithms are not very effective for a mixed data set containing both numerical attributes and categorical attributes. To overcome this deficiency, a generalized mechanism is presented in this paper by integrating Rényi entropy and complement entropy together. The mechanism is able to uniformly characterize within-cluster entropy and between-cluster entropy and to identify the worst cluster in a mixed data set. In order to evaluate the clustering results for mixed data, an effective cluster validity index is also defined in this paper. Furthermore, by introducing a new dissimilarity measure into the k-prototypes algorithm, we develop an algorithm to determine the number of clusters in a mixed data set. The performance of the algorithm has been studied on several synthetic and real world data sets. The comparisons with other clustering algorithms show that the proposed algorithm is more effective in detecting the optimal number of clusters and generates better clustering results.     

Scalable algorithms for clustering large datasets with mixed type attributes

Clustering is a widely used technique in data mining applications for discovering patterns in underlying data. Most traditional clustering algorithms are limited to handling datasets that contain either numeric or categorical attributes. However, datasets with mixed types of attributes are common in real life data mining applications. In this article, we present two algorithms that extend the Squeezer algorithm to domains with mixed numeric and categorical attributes. The performance of the two algorithms has been studied on real and artificially generated datasets. Comparisons with other clustering algorithms illustrate the superiority of our approaches. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Int Syst 20: 1077–1089, 2005.     

数值型和分类型混合数据的模糊K-Prototypes聚类算法

由于数据库经常同时包含数值型和分类型的属性,因此研究能够处理混合型数据的聚类算法无疑是很重要的.讨论了混合型数据的聚类问题,提出了一种模糊K-prototypes算法.该算法融合了K-means和K-modes对数值型和分类型数据的处理方法,能够处理混合类型的数据.模糊技术体现聚类的边界特征,更适合处理含有噪声和缺失数据的数据库.实验结果显示,模糊算法比相应的确定算法得到的结果准确度高.     

面向混合属性数据集的改进半监督FCM聚类方法

针对混合属性数据集聚类精度低的问题,本文提出一种基于改进距离度量的半监督模糊均值聚类（Fuzzy C-means,FCM）算法.首先,在数据集中针对类别属性进行预处理,并设置相应的相异度阈值;将传统聚类距离度量与改进的Jaccard距离度量结合,确定混合属性数据集的距离度量函数;最后,将所得距离度量函数与传统半监督FCM算法相结合,并在滚动轴承的不同复合故障数据的特征集中进行聚类.实验表明,该算法能在含无序属性的混合属性数据集的聚类中取得更好的聚类效果.     

基于k-prototypes的混合属性数据聚类算法

通过对基于K-prototypes算法对混合属性数据处理的聚类问题进行研究,改进了K-prototypes算法中分类属性相异度计算公式,使之能更加精确反映样本间的差异;在此基础上提出了一种用于处理混合属性数据的聚类算法,并将改进后的算法应用于英语借词数据的聚类分析中。实验结果表明,与K-prototypes算法相比,改进后的算法具有更好的稳定性和更高的精度。     

On clustering tree structured data with categorical nature

Clustering consists in partitioning a set of objects into disjoint and homogeneous clusters. For many years, clustering methods have been applied in a wide variety of disciplines and they also have been utilized in many scientific areas. Traditionally, clustering methods deal with numerical data, i.e. objects represented by a conjunction of numerical attribute values. However, nowadays commercial or scientific databases usually contain categorical data, i.e. objects represented by categorical attributes. In this paper we present a dissimilarity measure which is capable to deal with tree structured categorical data. Thus, it can be used for extending the various versions of the very popular k-means clustering algorithm to deal with such data. We discuss how such an extension can be achieved. Moreover, we empirically prove that the proposed dissimilarity measure is accurate, compared to other well-known (dis)similarity measures for categorical data.     

Clustering categorical data sets using tabu search techniques

Clustering methods partition a set of objects into clusters such that objects in the same cluster are more similar to each other than objects in different clusters according to some defined criteria. The fuzzy k-means-type algorithm is best suited for implementing this clustering operation because of its effectiveness in clustering data sets. However, working only on numeric values limits its use because data sets often contain categorical values. In this paper, we present a tabu search based clustering algorithm, to extend the k-means paradigm to categorical domains, and domains with both numeric and categorical values. Using tabu search based techniques, our algorithm can explore the solution space beyond local optimality in order to aim at finding a global solution of the fuzzy clustering problem. It is found that the clustering results produced by the proposed algorithm are very high in accuracy.     

Partition-and-merge based fuzzy genetic clustering algorithm for categorical data

Categorical data clustering is a difficult and challenging task due to the special characteristic of categorical attributes: no natural order. Thus, this study aims to propose a two-stage method named partition-and-merge based fuzzy genetic clustering algorithm (PM-FGCA) for categorical data. The proposed PM-FGCA uses a fuzzy genetic clustering algorithm to partition the dataset into a maximum number of clusters in the first stage. Then, the merge stage is designed to select two clusters among the clusters that generated in the first stage based on its inter-cluster distances and merge two selected clusters to one cluster. This procedure is repeated until the number of clusters equals to the predetermined number of clusters. Thereafter, some particular instances in each cluster are considered to be re-assigned to other clusters based on the intra-cluster distances. The proposed PM-FGCA is implemented on ten categorical datasets from UCI machine learning repository. In order to evaluate the clustering performance, the proposed PM-FGCA is compared with some existing methods such as k-modes algorithm, fuzzy k-modes algorithm, genetic fuzzy k-modes algorithm, and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm using fuzzy membership chromosomes. Adjusted Ranked Index (ARI), Normalized Mutual Information (NMI), and Davies–Bouldin (DB) index are selected as three clustering validation indices which are represented to both external index (i.e., ARI and NMI) and internal index (i.e., DB). Consequently, the experimental result shows that the proposed PM-FGCA outperforms the benchmark methods in terms of the tested indices.     

Efficient algorithms based on the k-means and Chaotic League Championship Algorithm for numeric,categorical, and mixed-type data clustering

The success rates of the expert or intelligent systems depend on the selection of the correct data clusters. The k-means algorithm is a well-known method in solving data clustering problems. It suffers not only from a high dependency on the algorithm's initial solution but also from the used distance function. A number of algorithms have been proposed to address the centroid initialization problem, but the produced solution does not produce optimum clusters. This paper proposes three algorithms (i) the search algorithm C-LCA that is an improved League Championship Algorithm (LCA), (ii) a search clustering using C-LCA (SC-LCA), and (iii) a hybrid-clustering algorithm called the hybrid of k-means and Chaotic League Championship Algorithm (KSC-LCA) and this algorithm has of two computation stages. The C-LCA employs chaotic adaptation for the retreat and approach parameters, rather than constants, which can enhance the search capability. Furthermore, to overcome the limitation of the original k-means algorithm using the Euclidean distance that cannot handle the categorical attribute type properly, we adopt the Gower distance and the mechanism for handling a discrete value requirement of the categorical value attribute. The proposed algorithms can handle not only the pure numeric data but also the mixed-type data and can find the best centroids containing categorical values. Experiments were conducted on 14 datasets from the UCI repository. The SC-LCA and KSC-LCA competed with 16 established algorithms including the k-means, k-means++, global k-means algorithms, four search clustering algorithms and nine hybrids of k-means algorithm with several state-of-the-art evolutionary algorithms. The experimental results show that the SC-LCA produces the cluster with the highest F-Measure on the pure categorical dataset and the KSC-LCA produces the cluster with the highest F-Measure for the pure numeric and mixed-type tested datasets. Out of 14 datasets, there were 13 centroids produced by the SC-LCA that had better F-Measures than that of the k-means algorithm. On the Tic-Tac-Toe dataset containing only categorical attributes, the SC-LCA can achieve an F-Measure of 66.61 that is 21.74 points over that of the k-means algorithm (44.87). The KSC-LCA produced better centroids than k-means algorithm in all 14 datasets; the maximum F-Measure improvement was 11.59 points. However, in terms of the computational time, the SC-LCA and KSC-LCA took more NFEs than the k-means and its variants but the KSC-LCA ranks first and SC-LCA ranks fourth among the hybrid clustering and the search clustering algorithms that we tested. Therefore, the SC-LCA and KSC-LCA are general and effective clustering algorithms that could be used when an expert or intelligent system requires an accurate high-speed cluster selection.     

A fuzzy k-modes algorithm for clustering categorical data

This correspondence describes extensions to the fuzzy k-means algorithm for clustering categorical data. By using a simple matching dissimilarity measure for categorical objects and modes instead of means for clusters, a new approach is developed, which allows the use of the k-means paradigm to efficiently cluster large categorical data sets. A fuzzy k-modes algorithm is presented and the effectiveness of the algorithm is demonstrated with experimental results     

FCM-Based Model Selection Algorithms for Determining the Number of Clusters

Clustering is an important research topic that has practical applications in many fields. It has been demonstrated that fuzzy clustering, using algorithms such as the fuzzy C-means (FCM), has clear advantages over crisp and probabilistic clustering methods. Like most clustering algorithms, however, FCM and its derivatives need the number of clusters in the given data set as one of their initializing parameters. The main goal of this paper is to develop an effective fuzzy algorithm for automatically determining the number of clusters. After a brief review of the relevant literature, we present a new algorithm for determining the number of clusters in a given data set and a new validity index for measuring the “goodness” of clustering. Experimental results and comparisons are given to illustrate the performance of the new algorithm.     

模糊K-Prototypes算法中的加权指数研究

模糊K Prototypes(FKP)算法融合了K Means和K Modes对数值型和符号型数据的处理方法,适合于混合类型数据的聚类分析。同时,模糊技术使得FKP适合于处理含有噪声和缺少数据的数据库。但是,在使用FCM(FuzzyC Meansalgorithm)或FKP算法时,如何选取加权指数α仍是悬而未决的问题。许多研究者基于他们的实验结果给出FCM中的最佳加权指数可能位于区间 [1. 5,2. 5],本文则提出了一个FKP中加权指数的探寻算法。在多个实际数据集上的实验结果表明,为进行有效的聚类,FKP中加权指数应该小于 1. 5。     

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.     

属性加权的类属型数据非模聚类

类属型数据广泛分布于生物信息学等许多应用领域,其离散取值的特点使得类属数据聚类成为统计机器学习领域一项困难的任务.当前的主流方法依赖于类属属性的模进行聚类优化和相关属性的权重计算.提出一种非模的类属型数据统计聚类方法.首先,基于新定义的相异度度量,推导了属性加权的类属数据聚类目标函数.该函数以对象与簇之间的平均距离为基础,从而避免了现有方法以模为中心导致的问题.其次,定义了一种类属型数据的软子空间聚类算法.该算法在聚类过程中根据属性取值的总体分布,而不仅限于属性的模,赋予每个属性衡量其与簇类相关程度的权重,实现自动的特征选择.在合成数据和实际应用数据集上的实验结果表明,与现有的基于模的聚类算法和基于蒙特卡罗优化的其他非模算法相比,该算法有效地提高了聚类结果的质量.     

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.