With the dawn of the Big Data era, data sets are growing rapidly. Data is streaming from everywhere - from cameras, mobile phones, cars, and other electronic devices. Clustering streaming data is a very challenging problem. Unlike the traditional clustering algorithms where the dataset can be stored and scanned multiple times, clustering streaming data has to satisfy constraints such as limit memory size, real-time response, unknown data statistics and an unknown number of clusters. In this paper, we present a novel online clustering algorithm which can be used to cluster streaming data without knowing the number of clusters a priori. Results on both synthetic and real datasets show that the proposed algorithm produces partitions which are close to what you could get if you clustered the whole data at one time.
Finding useful patterns in large datasets has attracted considerable interest recently, and one of the most widely studied problems in this area is the identification of clusters, or densely populated regions, in a multi-dimensional dataset. Prior work does not adequately address the problem of large datasets and minimization of I O costs.This paper presents a data clustering method named BIRCH (Balanced Iterative Reducing and Clustering using Hierarchies), and demonstrates that it is especially suitable for very large databases. BIRCH incrementally and dynamically clusters incoming multi-dimensional metric data points to try to produce the best quality clustering with the available resources (i.e., available memory and time constraints). BIRCH can typically find a good clustering with a single scan of the data, and improve the quality further with a few additional scans. BIRCH is also the first clustering algorithm proposed in the database area to handle "noise" (data points that are not part of the underlying pattern) effectively.We evaluate BIRCH's time space efficiency, data input order sensitivity, and clustering quality through several experiments. We also present a performance comparisons of BIRCH versus CLARANS, a clustering method proposed recently for large datasets, and show that BIRCH is consistently superior. The clustering problem is a difficult problem for the data stream domain. This is because the large volumes of data arriving in a stream renders most traditional algorithms too inefficient. In recent years, a few one-pass clustering algorithms have been developed for the data stream problem. Although such methods address the scalability issues of the clustering problem, they are generally blind to the evolution of the data and do not address the following issues: (1) The quality of the clusters is poor when the data evolves considerably over time. (2) A data stream clustering algorithm requires much greater functionality in discovering and exploring clusters over different portions of the stream. The widely used practice of viewing data stream clustering algorithms as a class of one-pass clustering algorithms is not very useful from an application point of view. For example, a simple one-pass clustering algorithm over an entire data stream of a few years is dominated by the outdated history of the stream. The exploration of the stream over different time windows can provide the users with a much deeper understanding of the evolving behavior of the clusters. At the same time, it is not possible to simultaneously perform dynamic clustering over all possible time horizons for a data stream of even moderately large volume. This paper discusses a fundamentally different philosophy for data stream clustering which is guided by application-centered requirements. The idea is divide the clustering process into an online component which periodically stores detailed summary statistics and an offine component which uses only this summary statistics. The offine component is utilized by the analyst who can use a wide variety of inputs (such as time horizon or number of clusters) in order to provide a quick understanding of the broad clusters in the data stream. The problems of efficient choice, storage, and use of this statistical data for a fast data stream turns out to be quite tricky. For this purpose, we use the concepts of a pyramidal time frame in conjunction with a microclustering approach. Our performance experiments over a number of real and synthetic data sets illustrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and insights provided by our approach.