Generalizing self-organizing map for categorical data

The self-organizing map (SOM) is an unsupervised neural network which projects high-dimensional data onto a low-dimensional grid and visually reveals the topological order of the original data. Self-organizing maps have been successfully applied to many fields, including engineering and business domains. However, the conventional SOM training algorithm handles only numeric data. Categorical data are usually converted to a set of binary data before training of an SOM takes place. If a simple transformation scheme is adopted, the similarity information embedded between categorical values may be lost. Consequently, the trained SOM is unable to reflect the correct topological order. This paper proposes a generalized self-organizing map model that offers an intuitive method of specifying the similarity between categorical values via distance hierarchies and, hence, enables the direct process of categorical values during training. In fact, distance hierarchy unifies the distance computation of both numeric and categorical values. The unification is done by mapping the values to distance hierarchies and then measuring the distance in the hierarchies. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets were conducted, and the results demonstrated the effectiveness of the generalized SOM model.     

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.     

TCSOM: Clustering Transactions Using Self-Organizing Map

Self-Organizing Map (SOM) networks have been successfully applied as a clustering method to numeric datasets. However, it is not feasible to directly apply SOM for clustering transactional data. This paper proposes the Transactions Clustering using SOM (TCSOM) algorithm for clustering binary transactional data. In the TCSOM algorithm, a normalized Dot Product norm based dissimilarity measure is utilized for measuring the distance between input vector and output neuron. And a modified weight adaptation function is employed for adjusting weights of the winner and its neighbors. More importantly, TCSOM is a one-pass algorithm, which is extremely suitable for data mining applications. Experimental results on real datasets show that TCSOM algorithm is superior to those state-of-the-art transactional data clustering algorithms with respect to clustering accuracy.     

结合柯西核的分类型数据密度峰值聚类算法

密度峰值聚类算法在处理分类型数据时难以产生较好的聚类效果。针对该现象,详细分析了其产生的原因：距离计算的重叠问题和密度计算的聚集问题。同时为了解决上述问题,提出了一种面向分类型数据的密度峰值聚类算法（Cauchy kernel-based density peaks clustering for categorical data,CDPCD）。算法首先指出分类型数据距离度量过程中有序特性（分类型数据属性值之间的顺序关系）鲜有考虑的现状,进而提出一种基于概率分布的加权有序距离度量来缓解重叠问题。通过结合柯西核函数,在共享最近邻密度峰值聚类算法基础上重新评估数据密度值,改进了密度计算和二次分配方式,增强了密度多样性,降低了聚集问题带来的影响。多个真实数据集上的实验结果表明,相较于传统的基于划分和密度的聚类算法,CDPCD都取得了更好的聚类结果。     

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.     

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 self-organizing map for transactional data and the related categorical domain

After projecting high dimensional data into a two-dimension map via the SOM, users can easily view the inner structure of the data on the 2-D map. In the early stage of data mining, it is useful for any kind of data to inspect their inner structure. However, few studies apply the SOM to transactional data and the related categorical domain, which are usually accompanied with concept hierarchies. Concept hierarchies contain information about the data but are almost ignored in such researches. This may cause mistakes in mapping. In this paper, we propose an extended SOM model, the SOMCD, which can map the varied kinds of data in the categorical domain into a 2-D map and visualize the inner structure on the map. By using tree structures to represent the different kinds of data objects and the neurons’ prototypes, a new devised distance measure which takes information embedded in concept hierarchies into consideration can properly find the similarity between the data objects and the neurons. Besides the distance measure, we base the SOMCD on a tree-growing adaptation method and integrate the U-Matrix for visualization. Users can hierarchically separate the trained neurons on the SOMCD's map into different groups and cluster the data objects eventually. From the experiments in synthetic and real datasets, the SOMCD performs better than other SOM variants and clustering algorithms in visualization, mapping and clustering.     

Integrated dimensionality reduction technique for mixed-type data involving categorical values

Dimensionality reduction is a useful technique to cope with high dimensionality of the real-world data. However, traditional methods were studied in the context of datasets with only numeric attributes. With the demand of analyzing datasets involving categorical attributes, an extension to the recent dimensionality-reduction technique t-SNE is proposed. The extension facilitates t-SNE to handle mixed-type datasets. Each attribute of the data is associated with a distance hierarchy which allows the distance between numeric values and between categorical values be measured in a unified manner. More importantly, domain knowledge regarding distance considering semantics embedded in categorical values can be specified via the hierarchy. Consequently, the extended t-SNE can project the high-dimensional, mixed data to a low-dimensional space with topological order which reflects user's intuition.     

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.     

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.     

类属型数据核子空间聚类算法

现有的类属型数据子空间聚类方法大多基于特征间相互独立假设,未考虑属性间存在的线性或非线性相关性.提出一种类属型数据核子空间聚类方法.首先引入原作用于连续型数据的核函数将类属型数据投影到核空间,定义了核空间中特征加权的类属型数据相似性度量.其次,基于该度量推导了类属型数据核子空间聚类目标函数,并提出一种高效求解该目标函数的优化方法.最后,定义了一种类属型数据核子空间聚类算法.该算法不仅在非线性空间中考虑了属性间的关系,而且在聚类过程中赋予每个属性衡量其与簇类相关程度的特征权重,实现了类属型属性的嵌入式特征选择.还定义了一个聚类有效性指标,以评价类属型数据聚类结果的质量.在合成数据和实际数据集上的实验结果表明,与现有子空间聚类算法相比,核子空间聚类算法可以发掘类属型属性间的非线性关系,并有效提高了聚类结果的质量.     

面向分类数据的自组织神经网络

作为一种优良的聚类和降维工具,自组织神经网络SOM(SelfOrganizingFeatureMaps)已经得到广泛应用。其不足之处是仅适合于数值数据,这对时常需要处理分类型数据(Categoricalvalueddata)或数值型与分类型混合数据(Mixednumericandcategoricalvalueddata)的数据挖掘应用是不够的。该文提出了一种新的基于覆盖(Overlap)的距离函数并将其用于SOM训练。实验结果表明,在不增加时空开销的前提下可取得较好的聚类效果。     

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.     

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。     

Growing Self-Organizing Map with cross insert for mixed-type data clustering

Self-Organizing Map (SOM) possesses effective capability for visualizing high-dimensional data. Therefore, SOM has numerous applications in visualized clustering. Many growing SOMs have been proposed to overcome the constraint of having a fixed map size in conventional SOMs. However, most growing SOMs lack a robust solution to process mixed-type data which may include numeric, ordinal and categorical values in a dataset. Moreover, the growing scheme has an impact on the quality of resultant maps. In this paper, we propose a Growing Mixed-type SOM (GMixSOM), combining a value representation mechanism distance hierarchy with a novel growing scheme to tackle the problem of analyzing mixed-type data and to improve the quality of the projection map. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed mechanism is feasible and the growing scheme yields better projection maps than the existing method.     

基于密度峰值的混合型数据聚类算法设计

针对k-prototypes算法无法自动识别簇数以及无法发现任意形状的簇的问题,提出一种针对混合型数据的新方法：寻找密度峰值的聚类算法。首先,把CFSFDP（Clustering by Fast Search and Find of Density Peaks）聚类算法扩展到混合型数据集,定义混合型数据对象之间的距离后利用CFSFDP算法确定出簇中心,这样也就自动确定了簇的个数,然后其余的点按照密度从大到小的顺序进行分配。其次,研究了该算法中阈值（截断距离）及权值的选取问题：对于密度公式中的阈值,通过计算数据场中的势熵来自动提取;对于距离公式中的权值,利用度量数值型数据集和分类型数据集聚类趋势的统计量来定义。最后通过在三个实际混合型数据集上的测试发现：与传统k-prototypes算法相比,寻找密度峰值的聚类算法能有效提高聚类的精度。     

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.     

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。     

MIGSOM: Multilevel Interior Growing Self-Organizing Maps for High Dimensional Data Clustering

Understanding the inherent structure of high-dimensional datasets is a very challenging task. This can be tackled from visualization, summarizing or simply clustering points of view. The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a powerful and unsupervised neural network to resolve these kinds of problems. By preserving the data topology mapped onto a grid, SOM can facilitate visualization of data structure. However, classical SOM still suffers from the limits of its predefined structure. Growing variants of SOM can overcome this problem, since they have tried to define a network structure with no need an advance a fixed number of output units by dynamic growing architecture. In this paper we propose a new dynamic SOMs called MIGSOM: Multilevel Interior Growing SOMs for high-dimensional data clustering. MIGSOM present a different architecture than dynamic variants presented in the literature. Using an unsupervised training process MIGSOM has the capability of growing map size from the boundaries as well as the interior of the network in order to represent more faithfully the structure present in a data collection. As a result, MIGSOM can have three-dimensional (3-D) structure with different levels of oriented maps developed according to data direction. We demonstrate the potential of the MIGSOM with real-world datasets of high-dimensional properties in terms of topology preserving visualization, vectors summarizing by efficient quantization and data clustering. In addition, MIGSOM achieves better performance compared to growing grid and the classical SOM.