Micro-Clustering: Finding Small Clusters in Large Diversity

Abstract

We address the problem of un-supervised soft-clustering called micro-clustering. The aim of the problem is to enumerate all groups composed of records strongly related to each other, while standard clustering methods separate records at sparse parts. The problem formulation of micro-clustering is non-trivial. Clique mining in a similarity graph is a typical approach, but it results in a huge number of cliques that are of many similar cliques. We propose a new concept data polishing. The cause of huge solutions can be considered that the groups are not clear in the data, that is, the boundaries of the groups are not clear, because of noise, uncertainty, lie, lack, etc. Data polishing clarifies the groups by perturbating the data. Specifically, dense subgraphs that would correspond to clusters are replaced by cliques. The clusters are clarified as maximal cliques, thus the number of maximal cliques will be drastically reduced. We also propose an efficient algorithm applicable even for large scale data. Computational experiments showed the efficiency of our algorithm, i.e., the number of solutions is small, (e.g., 1,000), the members of each group are deeply related, and the computation time is short.