Clustering of Big Data with Mixed Features

Joshua Tobin; Mimi Zhang

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arXiv · 2011.06043

Clustering of Big Data with Mixed Features

Joshua Tobin·Mimi Zhang

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Abstract

Clustering large, mixed data is a central problem in data mining. Many approaches adopt the idea of k-means, and hence are sensitive to initialisation, detect only spherical clusters, and require a priori the unknown number of clusters. We here develop a new clustering algorithm for large data of mixed type, aiming at improving the applicability and efficiency of the peak-finding technique. The improvements are threefold: (1) the new algorithm is applicable to mixed data; (2) the algorithm is capable of detecting outliers and clusters of relatively lower density values; (3) the algorithm is competent at deciding the correct number of clusters. The computational complexity of the algorithm is greatly reduced by applying a fast k-nearest neighbors method and by scaling down to component sets. We present experimental results to verify that our algorithm works well in practice. Keywords: Clustering; Big Data; Mixed Attribute; Density Peaks; Nearest-Neighbor Graph; Conductance.

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Joshua Tobin, Mimi Zhang. 2020-11-11. Clustering of Big Data with Mixed Features. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.06043

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