We present a new fast online clustering algorithm that reliably recovers arbitrary-shaped data clusters in high throughout data streams. Unlike the existing state-of-the-art online clustering methods based on k-means or k-medoid, it does not make any restrictive generative assumptions. In addition, in contrast to existing nonparametric clustering techniques such as DBScan or DenStream, it gives provable theoretical guarantees. To achieve fast clustering, we propose to represent each cluster by a skeleton set which is updated continuously as new data is seen. A skeleton set consists of weighted samples from the data where weights encode local densities. The size of each skeleton set is adapted according to the cluster geometry. The proposed technique automatically detects the number of clusters and is robust to outliers. The algorithm works for the infinite data stream where more than one pass over the data is not feasible. We provide theoretical guarantees on the quality of the clustering and also demonstrate its advantage over the existing state-of-the-art on several datasets.
Another popular method used in the context of incremental clustering is doubling algorithm @cite_2 . Its standard version encodes every cluster by just one point. Furthermore, even though it allows for merging clusters, it does not permit to split them. We implement a variant of the method, where instead of one center several centers are kept per cluster. As we will show in experimental section, this purely deterministic approach, even though with some theoretical guarantees, is too sensitive to outliers.
@cite_2
2128326150 2036865416 2128012710 2016973429
Study of this paper describes the incremental behaviours of partitioning based K-means clustering. This incremental clustering is designed using the cluster’s metadata captured from the K-Means results. Experimental studies shows that this clustering outperformed when the number of clusters increased, number of objects increased, length of the cluster radius decreased, while the incremental clustering outperformed when the number of new data objects are inserted into the existing database. In incremental approach, the K-means clustering algorithm is applied to a dynamic database where the data may be frequently updated. And this approach measure the new cluster centers by directly computes the new data from the means of the existing clusters instead of rerunning the K-means algorithm. Thus it describes, at what percent of delta change in the original database up to which incremental K-means clustering behaves better than actual K-means. It can be also used for large multidimensional dataset. We present a clustering scheme that combines a mode-seeking phase with a cluster merging phase in the corresponding density map. While mode detection is done by a standard graph-based hill-climbing scheme, the novelty of our approach resides in its use of topological persistence to guide the merging of clusters. Our algorithm provides additional feedback in the form of a set of points in the plane, called a persistence diagram (PD), which provably reflects the prominences of the modes of the density. In practice, this feedback enables the user to choose relevant parameter values, so that under mild sampling conditions the algorithm will output the correct number of clusters, a notion that can be made formally sound within persistence theory. The algorithm only requires rough estimates of the density at the data points, and knowledge of (approximate) pairwise distances between them. It is therefore applicable in any metric space. Meanwhile, its complexity remains practical: although the size of the input distance matrix may be up to quadratic in the number of data points, a careful implementation only uses a linear amount of memory and takes barely more time to run than to read through the input. In this conference version of the paper we emphasize the experimental aspects of our work, describing the approach, giving an intuitive overview of its theoretical guarantees, discussing the choice of its parameters in practice, and demonstrating its potential in terms of applications through a series of experimental results obtained on synthetic and real-life data sets. Precise statements and proofs of our theoretical claims can be found in the full version of the paper [7]. Clustering is a fundamental task in many vision applications. To date, most clustering algorithms work in a batch setting and training examples must be gathered in a large group before learning can begin. Here we explore incremental clustering, in which data can arrive continuously. We present a novel incremental model-based clustering algorithm based on nonparametric Bayesian methods, which we call memory bounded variational Dirichlet process (MB-VDP). The number of clusters are determined flexibly by the data and the approach can be used to automatically discover object categories. The computational requirements required to produce model updates are bounded and do not grow with the amount of data processed. The technique is well suited to very large datasets, and we show that our approach outperforms existing online alternatives for learning nonparametric Bayesian mixture models. Motivated by applications such as document and image classification in information retrieval, we consider the problem of clustering dynamic point sets in a metric space. We propose a model called incremental clustering which is based on a careful analysis of the requirements of the information retrieval application, and which should also be useful in other applications. The goal is to efficiently maintain clusters of small diameter as new points are inserted. We analyze several natural greedy algorithms and demonstrate that they perform poorly. We propose new deterministic and randomized incremental clustering algorithms which have a provably good performance, and which we believe should also perform well in practice. We complement our positive results with lower bounds on the performance of incremental algorithms. Finally, we consider the dual clustering problem where the clusters are of fixed diameter, and the goal is to minimize the number of clusters.