Clustering of the self-organizing map using a clustering validity index based on inter-cluster and intra-cluster density

The self-organizing map (SOM) has been widely used in many industrial applications. Classical clustering methods based on the SOM often fail to deliver satisfactory results, specially when clusters have arbitrary shapes. In this paper, through some preprocessing techniques for filtering out noises and outliers, we propose a new two-level SOM-based clustering algorithm using a clustering validity index based on inter-cluster and intra-cluster density. Experimental results on synthetic and real data sets demonstrate that the proposed clustering algorithm is able to cluster data better than the classical clustering algorithms based on the SOM, and find an optimal number of clusters.     

基于相异性度量选取初始聚类中心改进的K-means聚类算法

选取合理的初始聚类中心是正确聚类的前提,针对现有的K-means算法随机选取聚类中心和无法处理离群点等问题,提出一种基于相异性度量选取初始聚类中心改进的K-means聚类算法.算法根据各数据对象之间的相异性构造相异性矩阵,定义了均值相异性和总体相异性两种度量准则;然后据此准则来确定初始聚类中心,并利用各簇中数据点的中位数代替均值以进行后续聚类中心的迭代,消除离群点对聚类准确率的影响.此外,所提出的算法每次运行结果保持一致,在初始化和处理离群点方面具有较好的鲁棒性.最后,在人工合成数据集和UCI数据集上进行实验,与3种经典聚类算法和两种优化初始聚类中心改进的K-means算法相比,所提出的算法具有较好的聚类性能.     

基于K-means的数据流离群点检测算法

针对数据流中离群点挖掘问题,在K-means聚类算法基础上,提出了基于距离的准则进行数据间离群点判断的离群点检测DOKM算法。根据数据流概念漂移检测结果来自适应地调整滑动窗口大小,从而实现对数据流的离群点检测,与其他离群点算法的一系列实验验证和对比结果表明,DOKM算法在人工数据集和真实数据集中均可以实现对离群点的有效检测。     

Iterative projected clustering by subspace mining

Irrelevant attributes add noise to high-dimensional clusters and render traditional clustering techniques inappropriate. Recently, several algorithms that discover projected clusters and their associated subspaces have been proposed. We realize the analogy between mining frequent itemsets and discovering dense projected clusters around random points. Based on this, we propose a technique that improves the efficiency of a projected clustering algorithm (DOC). Our method is an optimized adaptation of the frequent pattern tree growth method used for mining frequent itemsets. We propose several techniques that employ the branch and bound paradigm to efficiently discover the projected clusters. An experimental study with synthetic and real data demonstrates that our technique significantly improves on the accuracy and speed of previous techniques.     

基于绕质心聚类算法的大数据挖掘

针对大数据分析在大规模并行分布式系统和软件平台上可扩展的问题,提出了一个基于无参数围绕质心二进制分裂聚类（clustering using binary splitting,CLUBS）的大数据挖掘技术。该技术以完全无监督的方式工作,基于最小二次距离的准则进行分裂聚类将数据与噪声分离,通过中级精炼来识别仅包含异常值的块并为剩余块生成全面的簇,设计CLUBS的并行化版本以实现对大数据进行快速有效的聚类。实验表明CLUBS并行算法不受数据维度和噪声的影响,且比现有算法具有更好的可扩展性且速度较快。     

A distance-relatedness dynamic model for clustering high dimensional data of arbitrary shapes and densities

It is important to find the natural clusters in high dimensional data where visualization becomes difficult. A natural cluster is a cluster of any shape and density, and it should not be restricted to a globular shape as a wide number of algorithms assume, or to a specific user-defined density as some density-based algorithms require.In this work, it is proposed to solve the problem by maximizing the relatedness of distances between patterns in the same cluster. It is then possible to distinguish clusters based on their distance-based densities. A novel dynamic model is proposed based on new distance-relatedness measures and clustering criteria. The proposed algorithm “Mitosis” is able to discover clusters of arbitrary shapes and arbitrary densities in high dimensional data. It has a good computational complexity compared to related algorithms. It performs very well on high dimensional data, discovering clusters that cannot be found by known algorithms. It also identifies outliers in the data as a by-product of the cluster formation process. A validity measure that depends on the main clustering criterion is also proposed to tune the algorithm's parameters. The theoretical bases of the algorithm and its steps are presented. Its performance is illustrated by comparing it with related algorithms on several data sets.     

基于可靠性的鲁棒模糊聚类

相比于k-means算法,模糊C均值(FCM)通过引入模糊隶属度,考虑不同数据簇之间的相互作用,进而避免了聚类中心趋同性问题.然而模糊隶属度具有拖尾和翘尾的结构特征,因此使得FCM算法对噪声点和孤立点很敏感;此外,由于FCM算法倾向于将各数据簇均等分,因此算法对数据簇大小也很敏感,对非平衡数据簇聚类效果不佳.针对这些问...     

Possibilistic Exponential Fuzzy Clustering

Generally, abnormal points (noise and outliers) cause cluster analysis to produce low accuracy especially in fuzzy clustering. These data not only stay in clusters but also deviate the centroids from their true positions. Traditional fuzzy clustering like Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) always assigns data to all clusters which is not reasonable in some circumstances. By reformulating objective function in exponential equation, the algorithm aggressively selects data into the clusters. However noisy data and outliers cannot be properly handled by clustering process therefore they are forced to be included in a cluster because of a general probabilistic constraint that the sum of the membership degrees across all clusters is one. In order to improve this weakness, possibilistic approach relaxes this condition to improve membership assignment. Nevertheless, possibilistic clustering algorithms generally suffer from coincident clusters because their membership equations ignore the distance to other clusters. Although there are some possibilistic clustering approaches that do not generate coincident clusters, most of them require the right combination of multiple parameters for the algorithms to work. In this paper, we theoretically study Possibilistic Exponential Fuzzy Clustering (PXFCM) that integrates possibilistic approach with exponential fuzzy clustering. PXFCM has only one parameter and not only partitions the data but also filters noisy data or detects them as outliers. The comprehensive experiments show that PXFCM produces high accuracy in both clustering results and outlier detection without generating coincident problems.     

基于粗糙集的混合属性数据聚类算法

传统聚类方法将对象严格地划分到某一类,但是很多时候边界对象不能被严格地划分。基于粗糙集的k-means聚类算法和基于粗糙集的leader聚类算法,利用粗糙集理论将数据对象划分到一个簇的上近似集或下近似集当中,提供了一种新的处理不确定性的视角,很好地解决了这种边界不确定问题。但其缺点是不能处理混合属性数据,聚类结果对初值有明显的依赖性。针对这些算法存在的不足,给出了一种适用于混合属性数据的距离定义,对初始值的选取提出了改进办法,提出了一种基于粗糙集的混合属性数据聚类算法。仿真实验证明,在不确定聚类簇数的情况下,该算法的聚类准确率比传统k-means算法明显提高。     

三种谱聚类算法及其应用研究

聚类分析是数据挖掘领域中一个重要研究内容,谱聚类(Spectral Clustering, SC)由于具有计算简便,性能优越等特点,已经成为最流行的聚类算法之一。本文利用四类几何结构数据,对规范化割(Normalized Cut, NCUT)、稀疏子空间聚类(Sparse subspace clustering, SSC)和谱曲率聚类(Spectral Curvature Clustering, SCC)三种谱聚类算法进行了分析和比较。实验结果表明,针对本文实验数据三种算法的聚类结果各有差异,但每类数据都可以找到相对最有效的聚类算法,方便读者对算法的选择和使用。NCUT无法处理相交的数据,适用性较差,但对于不相交的二次曲线聚类精度较高,并且优于SSC和SCC算法;相比NCUT算法,SSC算法适用性较强,能够实现四类几何结构数据的聚类,但在聚类过程中常出现误分现象,导致聚类精度不高;与前两种算法相比,SCC算法具有适用性强,精度高等特点,能够实现四类几何结构数据有效聚类,尤其对于实验数据中“横”和“竖”两类点组成的十字,SCC算法能够得到较好的聚类结果,解决由于数据量大SSC算法无法处理的问题。此外,针对有数据间断的两条相交螺旋线聚类问题,本文在现有SCC算法基础上进行改进,结果表明,改进后算法能够有效地实现数据聚类,具有良好的实用性。最后,文章分析了现有SCC算法存在的不足,并指出进一步研究的方向。     

A novel clustering algorithm based on data transformation approaches

Clustering provides a knowledge acquisition method for intelligent systems. This paper proposes a novel data-clustering algorithm, by combining a new initialization technique, K-means algorithm and a new gradual data transformation approach to provide more accurate clustering results than the K-means algorithm and its variants by increasing the clusters’ coherence. The proposed data transformation approach solves the problem of generating empty clusters, which frequently occurs for other clustering algorithms. An efficient method based on the principal component transformation and a modified silhouette algorithm is also proposed in this paper to determine the number of clusters. Several different data sets are used to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed method to deal with the empty cluster generation problem and its accuracy and computational performance in comparison with other K-means based initialization techniques and clustering methods. The developed estimation method for determining the number of clusters is also evaluated and compared with other estimation algorithms. Significances of the proposed method include addressing the limitations of the K-means based clustering and improving the accuracy of clustering as an important method in the field of data mining and expert systems. Application of the proposed method for the knowledge acquisition in time series data such as wind, solar, electric load and stock market provides a pre-processing tool to select the most appropriate data to feed in neural networks or other estimators in use for forecasting such time series. In addition, utilization of the knowledge discovered by the proposed K-means clustering to develop rule based expert systems is one of the main impacts of the proposed method.     

Cluster merging based on a decision threshold

Data clustering is an important unsupervised learning technique and has wide application in various fields including pattern recognition, data mining, image analysis and bioinformatics. A vast amount of clustering algorithms have been proposed in the past decades. However, existing algorithms still face many problems in practical applications. One typical problem is the parameter dependence, which means that user-specified parameters are required as input and the clustering results are influenced by these parameters. Another problem is that many algorithms are not able to generate clusters of non-spherical shapes. In this paper, a cluster merging method is proposed to solve the above-mentioned problems based on a decision threshold and the dominant sets algorithm. Firstly, the influence of similarity parameter on dominant sets clustering results is studied, and it is found that the obtained clusters become larger with the increase in similarity parameter. We analyze the reason behind this behavior and propose to generate small initial clusters in the first step and then merge the initial clusters to improve the clustering results. Specifically, we select a similarity parameter which generates small but not too small clusters. Then, we calculate pairwise merging decisions among the initial clusters and obtain a merging decision threshold. Based on this threshold, we merge the small clusters and obtain the final clustering results. Experiments on several datasets are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

     

一种新的演化文本流聚类算法

数据流的聚类作为聚类的一个分支,已经成为了数据挖掘的研究热点。虽然已经有不少数据流算法出现,但是大部分都是针对低维的数值型数据,很少有高维文本流的研究。本文在传统的数据流聚类框架基础上,提出了一种新的文本微聚类结构体,它更适合文本聚类,同时还将在线微聚类分为潜在微聚类和异常微聚类,提高了对孤立点的适应能力。实验表明该算法相对于其他文本流聚类算法更有效。     

改进的FCM聚类算法在Weka平台的应用

模糊C-均值聚类算法是目前应用最广泛的聚类算法,但其仍然存在对孤立点敏感及对初始中心点依赖等问题.为此,提出了一种改进的基于样本加权的模糊聚类算法,该算法可以更加准确的获得初始中心点且去除噪声点.同时,针对Weka系统中聚类算法的薄弱性以及聚类问题在数据挖掘领域的广泛性,本文对此平台进行二次开发并对传统FCM算法与改进算法进行研究.研究发现,改进算法使得聚类结果稳定,且能准确获得聚类结果,提高了算法准确率.     

Learning-based EM clustering for data on the unit hypersphere with application to exoplanet data

This study focuses on clustering algorithms for data on the unit hypersphere. This type of directional data lain on the surface of a unit hypersphere is used in geology, biology, meteorology, medicine and oceanography. The EM algorithm with mixtures of von Mises-Fisher distributions is often used for model-based clustering for data on the unit hypersphere. However, the EM algorithm is sensitive to initial values and outliers and a number of clusters must be assigned a priori. In this paper, we propose an effective approach, called a learning-based EM algorithm with von Mises-Fisher distributions, to cluster this type of hyper-spherical data. The proposed clustering method is robust to outliers, without the need for initialization, and automatically determines the number of clusters. Thus, it becomes a fully-unsupervised model-based clustering method for data on the unit hypersphere. Some numerical and real examples with comparisons are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method. We also apply the proposed learning-based EM algorithm to cluster exoplanet data in extrasolar planets. The clustering results have several important implications for exoplanet data and allow an interpretation of exoplanet migration.     

HC_AB: A new heuristic clustering algorithm based on Approximate Backbone

Clustering is an important research area with numerous applications in pattern recognition, machine learning, and data mining. Since the clustering problem on numeric data sets can be formulated as a typical combinatorial optimization problem, many researches have addressed the design of heuristic algorithms for finding sub-optimal solutions in a reasonable period of time. However, most of the heuristic clustering algorithms suffer from the problem of being sensitive to the initialization and do not guarantee the high quality results. Recently, Approximate Backbone (AB), i.e., the commonly shared intersection of several sub-optimal solutions, has been proposed to address the sensitivity problem of initialization. In this paper, we aim to introduce the AB into heuristic clustering to overcome the initialization sensitivity of conventional heuristic clustering algorithms. The main advantage of the proposed method is the capability of restricting the initial search space around the optimal result by defining the AB, and in turn, reducing the impact of initialization on clustering, eventually improving the performance of heuristic clustering. Experiments on synthetic and real world data sets are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in comparison to three conventional heuristic clustering algorithms and three other algorithms with improvement on initialization.     

Density Based Cluster Growing via Dominant Sets

Although there are a lot of clustering algorithms available in the literature, existing algorithms are usually afflicted by practical problems of one form or another, including parameter dependence and the inability to generate clusters of arbitrary shapes. In this paper we aim to solve these two problems by merging the merits of dominant sets and density based clustering algorithms. We firstly apply histogram equalization to eliminate the parameter dependence problem of the dominant sets algorithm. Noticing that the obtained clusters are usually smaller than the real ones, a density threshold based cluster growing step is then used to improve the clustering results, where the involved parameters are determined based on the initial clusters. This is followed by the second cluster growing step which makes use of the density relationship between neighboring data. Data clustering experiments and comparison with other algorithms validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.     

Dynamic local search based immune automatic clustering algorithm and its applications

Based on clonal selection mechanism in immune system, a dynamic local search based immune automatic clustering algorithm (DLSIAC) is proposed to automatically evolve the number of clusters as well as a proper partition of datasets. The real based antibody encoding consists of the activation thresholds and the clustering centers. Then based on the special structures of chromosomes, a particular dynamic local search scheme is proposed to exploit the neighborhood of each antibody as much as possible so to realize automatic variation of the antibody length during evolution. The dynamic local search scheme includes four basic operations, namely, the external cluster swapping, the internal cluster swapping, the cluster addition and the cluster decrease. Moreover, a neighborhood structure based clonal mutation is adopted to further improve the performance of the algorithm. The proposed algorithm has been extensively compared with five state-of-the-art automatic clustering techniques over a suit of datasets. Experimental results indicate that the DLSIAC is superior to other five clustering algorithms on the optimum number of clusters found and the clustering accuracy. In addition, DLSIAC is applied to a real problem, namely image segmentation, with a good performance.     

基于层次聚类的离群点分析方法

发现离群点并合理地解释离群点对数据挖掘结果的运用有重要意义,通过对离群点属性的检测可以发现其离群特性,进而更加准确地解释聚类结果。针对在聚类结果中出现的不同离群点及其特性,提出将层次聚类算法应用于离群点分析,通过元胞自动机距离变换算法实现凝固层次聚类,实现了簇间距离的度量;定义了演化周期上的平均度量距离,能够发现不同聚类层次上的离群点及其离群特性。该算法能够在得到聚类结果的同时,有效地解释离群点的属性,并具有较低的计算复杂度和并行计算以及向高维空间扩展的特性。通过试验数据进行了实证研究,验证了算法的有效性。     

基于层次聚类的孤立点检测方法

孤立点检测是数据挖掘过程的重要环节,提出了基于层次聚类的孤立点检测（ODHC）方法。ODHC方法基于层次聚类结果进行分析,对距离矩阵按簇间距离从大到小检测孤立点,可检测出指定离群程度的孤立点,直到达到用户对数据的集中性要求。该方法适用于多维数据集,且算法原理直观,用户友好,对孤立点的检测准确率较高。在iris、balloon等数据集上的仿真实验结果表明,ODHC方法能有效地识别孤立点,是一种简单实用的孤立点检测方法。