Design of computationally efficient density-based clustering algorithms

A method of two-stage clustering learning based on improved DBSCAN and density peak algorithm

The problem of anomaly detection in marine Argo data is studied. Based on the common and widely used DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) algorithm for anomaly detection in Argo data, as in other fields, there is a major problem in the application of DBSCAN algorithm, which is how to choose the appropriate parameter pairs. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an improved version of DBSCAN, namely CCMD-DBSCAN (DBSCAN based on the classification characteristics of marine data), which solves the above problem by studying the characteristics and laws of Argo data and is successfully applied to anomaly detection of marine data. The experimental results show that the new algorithm can not only determine the appropriate parameter pairs but also has a good anomaly detection effect.KeywordsArgoDBSCANAnomaly detection

In fingerprint-based localization systems, clustering fingerprint databases is a proposed technique for improving localization accuracy while reducing localization time. Among various clustering algorithms, density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) stands out for its robustness to outliers and ability to accommodate fingerprint databases of various shapes. However, the clustering performance of the DBSCAN algorithm is heavily influenced by the type of similarity measure metric used, with most researchers using distance-based metrics. This paper aims to enhance DBSCAN clustering by using a pattern-based metric known as the context similarity coefficient (CSC) instead of distance-based metrics. The CSC metric examines received signal strength (RSS) measurement patterns that form fingerprint vectors and assesses both linear and non-linear relationships between these vectors to determine similarity. Four publicly available fingerprint databases were used to evaluate the clustering performance with silhouette scores as a performance metric. The performance of the DBSCAN algorithm with the CSC metric is determined and compared to Euclidean and Manhattan distances as similarity measure metrics. Simulation results indicate that achieving good clustering performance with the DBSCAN algorithm requires generating three or fewer clusters. The proposed CSC metric demonstrated the best clustering performance in two of four fingerprint databases and the second-best in another. However, computational complexity comparisons reveal that the CSC metric is highly computationally intensive and is suggested to be used on small to medium-sized fingerprint databases generated using an odd number of wireless APs deployed in a non-uniform or non-grid-like distribution.

An efficient and scalable density-based clustering algorithm for datasets with complex structures

In recent years, the clustering of multi-density data has been a research hotspot. As a widely applied clustering algorithm, density-based spatial clustering of application with noise (DBSCAN) algorithm can avoid the interference of noise data, and has the ability to find clusters of any shape. However, the DBSCAN algorithm used hyperparameter (e.g., eps, MinPts), which makes the clusters of different densities cannot be identified. Furthermore, when the algorithm is applied to different datasets, the clustering quality would decrease severely. To cope with the above problems, we propose an improved and heuristic-based iterative DBSCAN clustering algorithm. The new algorithm realizes flexible clustering of the data with different densities by MinPts. In particular, we first estimate the values of MinPts according to the user area densities, then the new clustering is carried out based on the MinPts. This method avoids too dense clusters. In the experiments, Silhouette Coefficient and purity are adopted to evaluate the clustering effect of the improved DBSCAN algorithm. It is demonstrated that the proposed algorithm can effectively cluster multi-density data, and has greater adaptability and clustering performance to all kinds of data.

<span lang="EN-US">Automatic identification system (AIS) is a vessel radio navigation equipment that has been determined by international maritime organization (IMO). Historical AIS data can be utilized for anomaly detection, trajectory prediction, and vessel trajectory planning. These benefits can be achieved by identifying the vessel's trajectory pattern through trajectory clustering. However, more effort is needed in trajectory clustering using AIS data due to their large volume and the significant number of deficiencies. In addition, trajectory clustering cannot be directly applied to trajectory data, which also applies to vessel trajectory. Therefore, we propose a trajectory clustering framework by combining douglas peucker (DP), longest common subsequence (LCSS), multi-dimensional scaling (MDS), and density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN). Our experiments, carried out with AIS data for the Lombok Strait, Indonesia, showed that the trajectory compression with DP significantly accelerates the similarity measurement process. Moreover, we found that the LCSS is the optimal algorithm for similarity measurement of vessel trajectories based on AIS data. We also applied the right combination of MDS and DBSCAN in density-based clustering. The proposed framework can distinguish trajectoriess in different directions, identify the noise, and produce good quality clusters in relatively fast total processing time.</span>

The density based notion for clustering approach is used widely due to its easy implementation and ability to detect arbitrary shaped clusters in the presence of noisy data points without requiring prior knowledge of the number of clusters to be identified. Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) is the first algorithm proposed in the literature that uses density based notion for cluster detection. Since most of the real data set, today contains feature space of adjacent nested clusters, clearly DBSCAN is not suitable to detect variable adjacent density clusters due to the use of global density parameter neighborhood radius Nrad and minimum number of points in neighborhood Npts. So the efficiency of DBSCAN depends on these initial parameter settings, for DBSCAN to work properly, the neighborhood radius must be less than the distance between two clusters otherwise algorithm merges two clusters and detects them as a single cluster. Through this paper: 1) We have proposed improved version of DBSCAN algorithm to detect clusters of varying density adjacent clusters by using the concept of neighborhood difference and using the notion of density based approach without introducing much additional computational complexity to original DBSCAN algorithm. 2) We validated our experimental results using one of our authors recently proposed space density indexing (SDI) internal cluster measure to demonstrate the quality of proposed clustering method. Also our experimental results suggested that proposed method is effective in detecting variable density adjacent nested clusters.

Clustering algorithm is one of the most important algorithms in unsupervised learning. For density‐based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) density clustering algorithm, the selection of neighborhood radius and minimum number is the key to get the best clustering results. Aiming at the problems of traditional DBSCAN algorithm, such as the neighborhood radius and the minimum number of points, this article puts forward two classifications based on K‐means algorithm, and gets two clustering centers. Where calculated between two data points and the cluster center‐to ‐center distance, clustering, distance, statistics in a distance of data points within the scope of the search, the number of data points corresponding to the maximum distance value, and thus the parameters for the DBSCAN algorithm to estimate and selection of initial radius of neighborhood with the minimum number of clustering start critical value. When the parameters are iterated and optimized continuously, the data are divided into clusters, and the most suitable neighborhood radius and the minimum point number are obtained. The experimental data analysis show that the improved algorithm reduces the human factors in the traditional algorithm and improves the efficiency, so as to get the accurate clustering results.

In data-intensive environment, data mining and data analysis is a big challenge. It analyses basic algorithms, such as k-means algorithm and Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN). And both algorithms are implemented on MapReduce of Hadoop. Further, an improved Data-intensive Density Base Distributed Clustering (IDBDC) algorithm is proposed which are based on k-means algorithm and DBSCAN algorithm. And IDBDC algorithm is implemented on MapReduce of Hadoop as well. The experimental results show that the improved IDBDC algorithm has better performance.

Spatial clustering analysis is an important spatial data mining technique. It divides objects into clusters according to their similarities in both location and attribute aspects. It plays an essential role in density distribution identification, hot-spot detection, and trend discovery. Spatial clustering algorithms in the Euclidean space are relatively mature, while those in the network space are less well researched. This study aimed to present a well-known clustering algorithm, named density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), to network space and proposed a new clustering algorithm named network space DBSCAN (NS-DBSCAN). Basically, the NS-DBSCAN algorithm used a strategy similar to the DBSCAN algorithm. Furthermore, it provided a new technique for visualizing the density distribution and indicating the intrinsic clustering structure. Tested by the points of interest (POI) in Hanyang district, Wuhan, China, the NS-DBSCAN algorithm was able to accurately detect the high-density regions. The NS-DBSCAN algorithm was compared with the classical hierarchical clustering algorithm and the recently proposed density-based clustering algorithm with network-constraint Delaunay triangulation (NC_DT) in terms of their effectiveness. The hierarchical clustering algorithm was effective only when the cluster number was well specified, otherwise it might separate a natural cluster into several parts. The NC_DT method excessively gathered most objects into a huge cluster. Quantitative evaluation using four indicators, including the silhouette, the R-squared index, the Davis–Bouldin index, and the clustering scheme quality index, indicated that the NS-DBSCAN algorithm was superior to the hierarchical clustering and NC_DT algorithms.

The vibration and friction triggered by the long-term operation of stacker inevitably lead to the damage problem of stacker’s track. In order to ensure the stable operation of the stacker, a novel scheme is proposed to address an accurate damage localization problem of the stacker’s track in industrial environment based on ensemble empirical mode decomposition-empirical mode decomposition (EEMD-EMD) and density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN). First, the original electric current signal with unbalanced distribution is processed by fixed-interval smoothing and cubic Hermite interpolation algorithms. Second, the EEMD-EMD method, which solves the mode-mixing problem, is adopted to decompose the preprocessed signal into well-defined intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). Third, based on Hilbert–Huang transform (HHT) of the IMFs, the preprocessed signal and the difference of average instantaneous amplitudes in two adjacent time points are considered as the 2-D feature vector input of the DBSCAN algorithm. As such, damage locations of the stacker’s track are detected by means of the outliers that are obtained by the DBSCAN algorithm. The efficiency of the proposed localization scheme and its superiority over the existing cooperative damage localization methods, namely, the box-plot method, the pulse coupling neural network (PCNN) and wavelet transform (WT) theory method, and the box-plot and WT method, are verified through experiments using the data provided by State Grid Measuring Center of China.

Clustering is one of the basic data mining tasks that can be used to extract hidden information from data in the absence of target classes. One of the most well-known density based clustering algorithms for processing spatial data is Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Application with Noise (DBSCAN) that uses learning parameters epsiv and <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">minPts</i> to define the density that will be sought in the data set while forming the clusters. The major drawbacks of the DBSCAN algorithm are its sensitivity to user input required to execute the algorithm, inability to recognize clusters with different densities, and computational complexity. In this study, we propose a three-level clustering method to address the second issue. The first level selects appropriate grids so that the density is homogeneous in each grid. The second stage merges cells with similar densities and identifies the most suitable values of epsiv and <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">minPts</i> in each grid that remain after merging. The third step of the proposed method executes the DBSCAN method with these identified parameters in the dataset. The proposed method is tested in three artificial benchmark data sets to demonstrate that the clusters are correctly identified.

Revised DBSCAN algorithm to cluster data with dense adjacent clusters

Image segmentation is the process to divide a digital image into a number of regions for further usage. Color images can be segmented by applying density-based clustering methods, e.g. Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN), which is used to identify the arbitrary shaped clusters. The drawback of DBSCAN is the high computational complexity whilst the size of image input is normally very large. Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is a dimensionality reduction method which can be applied to reduce the dimensions of image processing tasks. This paper proposes a hybrid method of SOM and DBSCAN (SOM-DBSCAN) for image segmentation. To evaluating the usability of the proposed SOM-DBSCAN method, four images are used to benchmark image segmentation.

Clustering samples based on similarity remains a significant challenge, especially when the goal is to accurately capture the underlying data clusters of complex arbitrary shapes. Existing density-based clustering techniques are known to be best suited for capturing arbitrarily shaped clusters. However, a key limitation of these methods is the difficulty in automatically finding the optimal set of parameters adapted to dataset characteristics, which becomes even more challenging when the data contain inherent noise. In our recent work, we proposed a Differential Evolution-based DENsity CLUstEring (DE-DENCLUE) to optimise DENCLUE parameters. This study evaluates DE-DENCLUE for its robustness in finding accurate clusters in the presence of noise in the data. DE-DENCLUE performance is compared against three other density-based clustering algorithms—DPC based on weighted local density sequence and nearest neighbour assignment (DPCSA), Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN), and Variable Kernel Density Estimation–based DENCLUE (VDENCLUE)—across several datasets (i.e., synthetic and real). The study has consistently shown superior results for DE-DENCLUE compared to other models for most datasets with different noise levels. Clustering quality metrics such as the Silhouette Index (SI), Davies–Bouldin Index (DBI), Adjusted Rand Index (ARI), and Adjusted Mutual Information (AMI) consistently show superior SI, ARI, and AMI values across most datasets at different noise levels. However, in some cases regarding DBI, the DPCSA performed better. In conclusion, the proposed method offers a reliable and noise-resilient clustering solution for complex datasets.