SPORE: Skeleton Propagation Over Recalibrating Expansions

Abstract

Many real-world datasets are not linearly separable, limiting the effectiveness of centroid-based clustering methods such as K-means. Density-based clustering methods address this limitation by identifying clusters with arbitrary geometric structure; however, existing approaches exhibit two persistent shortcomings. First, they often underperform in the presence of heterogeneous local densities, where a single density threshold cannot adequately capture clusters across multiple density scales. Second, they generally lack the clear boundary delineation naturally induced by the linear partitioning mechanism of centroid-based methods. This paper introduces SPORE (Skeleton Propagation Over Recalibrating Expansions), a clustering algorithm designed to address both challenges while preserving the geometric flexibility of density-based approaches. SPORE operates in two stages: an adaptive cluster expansion phase followed by a proximity-driven boundary propagation phase that maintains discriminative capability even under weak density contrast. The proposed method is evaluated on 28 benchmark datasets against established density-based baselines, with K-means included as a reference centroid-based method. Experimental results demonstrate that SPORE achieves significantly improved cluster recovery relative to all evaluated baselines (p < 0.01), while strong-performing configurations can be identified within five random-search evaluations.