Soft subspace clustering with competitive agglomeration

Fuzzy partition based soft subspace clustering and its applications in high dimensional data

While the Euclidean distance metric is commonly utilized in most soft subspace clustering algorithms, some robust distance metrics can also be considered for soft subspace clustering. In this study, a novel soft subspace clustering algorithm called Alternative Soft Subspace Clustering (ASSC) is proposed by incorporating the alternative distance metric into the framework of entropy weighting subspace clustering. The properties of ASSC are investigated and a theoretical analysis on robustness is established accordingly. Experiments on UCI data are conducted and the experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Soft subspace clustering (SSC), which analyzes high-dimensional data and applies various weights to each cluster class to assess the membership degree of each cluster to the space, has shown promising results in recent years. This method of clustering assigns distinct weights to each cluster class. By introducing spatial information, enhanced SSC algorithms improve the degree to which intraclass compactness and interclass separation are achieved. However, these algorithms are sensitive to noisy data and have a tendency to fall into local optima. In addition, the segmentation accuracy is poor because of the influence of noisy data. In this study, an SSC approach that is based on particle swarm optimization is suggested with the intention of reducing the interference caused by noisy data. The particle swarm optimization method is used to locate the best possible clustering center. Second, increasing the amount of geographical membership makes it possible to utilize the spatial information to quantify the link between different clusters in a more precise manner. In conclusion, the extended noise clustering method is implemented in order to maximize the weight. Additionally, the constraint condition of the weight is changed from the equality constraint to the boundary constraint in order to reduce the impact of noise. The methodology presented in this research works to reduce the amount of sensitivity the SSC algorithm has to noisy data. It is possible to demonstrate the efficacy of this algorithm by using photos with noise already present or by introducing noise to existing photographs. The revised SSC approach based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is demonstrated to have superior segmentation accuracy through a number of trials; as a result, this work gives a novel method for the segmentation of noisy images.

High-dimensional data clustering is of great importance in the big data era. Multi-objective evolutionary soft subspace clustering (SSC) algorithms have shown promise in handling such datasets, but the objective functions and local search strategies used have not yet been well investigated. To consider these issues, this paper proposes an improved multiobjective evolutionary approach with new objective function and local search operator for clustering high-dimensional data. First, a new objective function is provided, which optimizes the clustering validity indexes and additional item simultaneously to overcome the difficulty of coefficient settings in the objective functions of existing SSC approaches. Second, an improved local search operator is introduced, which updates the weights of features by considering both the within-class compactness and between-class separation to capture a more comprehensive data structure. An experimental study with comparison with state-of-the-art SSC methods demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed approach.

High dimensional data is a phenomenon in real-world data mining applications. Text data is a typical example. In text mining, a text document is viewed as a vector of terms whose dimension is equal to the total number of unique terms in a data set, which is usually in thousands. High dimensional data occurs in business as well. In retails, for example, to effectively manage supplier relationship, suppliers are often categorized according to their business behaviors (Zhang, Huang, Qian, Xu, & Jing, 2006). The supplier’s behavior data is high dimensional, which contains thousands of attributes to describe the supplier’s behaviors, including product items, ordered amounts, order frequencies, product quality and so forth. One more example is DNA microarray data. Clustering high-dimensional data requires special treatment (Swanson, 1990; Jain, Murty, & Flynn, 1999; Cai, He, & Han, 2005; Kontaki, Papadopoulos & Manolopoulos., 2007), although various methods for clustering are available (Jain & Dubes, 1988). One type of clustering methods for high dimensional data is referred to as subspace clustering, aiming at finding clusters from subspaces instead of the entire data space. In a subspace clustering, each cluster is a set of objects identified by a subset of dimensions and different clusters are represented in different subsets of dimensions. Soft subspace clustering considers that different dimensions make different contributions to the identification of objects in a cluster. It represents the importance of a dimension as a weight that can be treated as the degree of the dimension in contribution to the cluster. Soft subspace clustering can find the cluster memberships of objects and identify the subspace of each cluster in the same clustering process.

Given the complexity of real-life event logs, several trace clustering techniques have been proposed to partition an event log into subsets with a lower degree of variation. In general, these techniques assume that the number of clusters is known in advance. However, this will rarely be the case in practice. Therefore, this paper presents approaches to determine the appropriate number of clusters in a trace clustering context. In order to fulfil the objective of identifying the most appropriate number of trace clusters, two approaches built on similarity are proposed: a stability- and a separation-based method. The stability-based method iteratively calculates the similarity between clustered versions of perturbed and unperturbed event logs. Alternatively, an approach based on between-cluster dissimilarity, or separation, is proposed. Regarding practical validation, both approaches are tested on multiple real-life datasets to investigate the complementarity of the different components. Our results suggest that both methods are successful in identifying an appropriate number of trace clusters.

Self-organizing subspace clustering for high-dimensional and multi-view data

Clustering is one of the relevant data mining tasks, which aims to process data sets in an effective way. This paper introduces a new clustering heuristic combining the E-transitive heuristic adapted to quantitative data and the k-means algorithm with the goal of ensuring the optimal number of clusters and the suitable initial cluster centres for k-means. The suggested heuris-tic, called PFK-means, is a parameter-free clustering algorithm since it does not require the prior initialization of the number of clusters. Thus, it generates progressively the initial cluster centres until the appropriate number of clusters is automatically detected. Moreover, this paper exposes a thorough comparison between the PFK-means heuristic, its diverse variants, the E-Transitive heuristic for clustering quantitative data and the traditional k-means in terms of the sum of squared errors and accuracy using different data sets. The experiments results reveal that, in general, the proposed heuristic and its variants provide the appropriate number of clusters for different real-world data sets and give good clusters quality related to the traditional k-means. Furthermore, the experiments conducted on synthetic data sets report the performance of this heuristic in terms of processing time.

From Aggregation Operators to Soft Learning Vector Quantization and Clustering Algorithms

Determining number of clusters and prototype locations via multi-scale clustering

Within the scope of cluster analysis of variables, the selection of the appropriate number of clusters is of paramount interest. The strategy of determination of the appropriate number of clusters adopted herein is based on a hypothesis testing approach. It consists in testing whether the variation of a partition quality criterion between two consecutive partitions is far removed from the expected variation under the null-hypothesis stipulating a lack of structure. Three hypothesis testing strategies are detailed and compared in the scope of clustering of variables: Gap, Weighted Gap and a statistic associated with CLV methodology. Finally, an illustration is presented based on data from a preference study.

Clustering complexity increases with the number of categories and sub-categories and with data dimensionality. In this case, the distance metrics lose discrimination power with the growth of such dimensionality. Thus, we propose a multiple-module soft subspace clustering algorithm called Subspace Clustering Multi-Module Self-Organizing Maps (SC-MuSOM) that produces a map for each category. Moreover, SC-MuSOM learns a relevance coefficient for each dimension of each cluster handling the dimensionality curse. This fast-training model has a second learning stage in which the cluster prototypes are finely tuned considering the spatial resemblance between cluster centers. We validated the model with data mining sets from UCI Repository and computer vision data. Our experiments suggest that SC-MuSOM is competitive with other state-of-the-art models for the tested problems.KeywordsSubspace clusteringHigh-dimensional dataSelf-organizing mapsMultiple-model clusteringFine-tuning stage

The study of good governance over the past two decades has been at the forefront of the world's scientific and international circles, especially in developing countries. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the status of countries based on good governance and determine the ranking of Iran among other countries, using clustering techniques. In order to select an appropriate clustering method and the appropriate number of clusters, the Silhouette coefficient for each K-Means, Two Step and Kohonen method was calculated for the number of different clusters of each. Based on an assessment of these findings, the K-Means 12 cluster method was selected. The research findings show that, among the four countries of the world having common clusters with Iran in terms of the level of human development, Iran ranks among the 'Lowlevel developing countries' and 'Moderate developing countries'. This issue highlights the importance of improving the level of good governance indicators in the country in order to achieve a higher level of development.

In this paper, a new multi-objective (MO) fuzzy-clustering technique is developed for unsupervised land-cover classification in remote-sensing images. This technique automatically partitions the pixels in the spectral domain into several clusters. The new MO clustering algorithm uses the newly developed simulated-annealing-based multi-objective optimization technique (AMOSA) as the underlying optimization strategy. Centre-based cluster encoding is used. Each cluster is divided into several small hyperspherical sub-clusters, and the centres of all these small sub-clusters are encoded in a string to represent the whole cluster. For membership-value computation of points to different clusters, these sub-clusters are considered individually. However, for the purpose of objective-function evaluation, these sub-clusters are merged appropriately to form some variable number of whole clusters. Three objective functions, one reflecting the total compactness of the partitioning based on the Euclidean distance, one reflecting the total point-symmetrical compactness of the obtained partitioning and one reflecting the total line-symmetrical compactness of the obtained partitioning are considered here. These are optimized simultaneously using AMOSA in order to detect the appropriate number of clusters and the appropriate partitioning from remote-sensing image datasets. The point symmetry present in a particular partitioning is measured using a newly developed point-symmetry-based distance, whereas the line symmetry present in a particular partitioning is measured using a newly developed line-symmetry-based distance. Since AMOSA, as well as any other MO optimization technique, provides a set of Pareto-optimal solutions, a new method is also developed to determine a single solution from this set. Different land-cover regions in remote-sensing imagery have been classified using the proposed technique to establish its efficiency. Results are compared with those obtained by fuzzy C-means (FCM) clustering technique and a recently developed symmetry-based automatic clustering technique, the variable string length genetic point symmetry (VGAPS) technique, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Qualitative comparisons are also carried out with the segmentation results obtained by the mean-shift-based segmentation technique.

Subspace clustering is an emerging area which explores clusters of objects in various subspaces. The existing subspace clustering algorithms are computationally expensive as they generate a large number of possibly redundant subspace clusters limiting the interpretability of the results. The problem gets even worse with the increase in data's dimensionality. So, this demands for efficient summarisation framework that generates limited number of interesting subspace clusters. A novel algorithm, Similarity Connectedness Based clustering on subspace clusters (SCoC) is proposed to form natural grouping of lower-dimensional subspace clusters. The concept of similarity connectedness is introduced to group and merge the subspace clusters formed in different lower-dimensional subspaces leaping through the lattice of dimensions. The resulted compact and summarised high-dimensional subspace clusters would easily be interpreted for making sound decisions. The SCoC algorithm is thoroughly tested on various benchmark datasets and found that it outperforms PCoC and SUBCLU both in cluster quality and execution time.