Robust local triangular kernel density-based clustering for high-dimensional data

Abstract

A number of clustering algorithms can be employed to find clusters in multivariate data. However, the effectiveness and efficiency of the existing algorithms are limited, since the respective data has high dimension, contain large amount of noise and consist of clusters with arbitrary shapes and densities. In this paper, a new kernel density-based clustering algorithm, called Local Triangular Kernel-based Clustering (LTKC), is proposed to deal with these conditions. LTKC is based on combination of k-nearest-neighbor density estimation and triangular kernel density-based clustering. The advantages of our LTKC approach are: (1) it has a firm mathematical basis; (2) it requires only one parameter, number of neighbors; (3) it defines the number of cluster automatically; (4) it allows discovering clusters with arbitrary shapes and densities; and (5) it is significantly faster than existing algorithms. LTKC is tested using artificial data and applied to some UCI data. A comparison with k-means, KFCM and well known density-based clustering algorithms including ILGC, DBSCAN, and DENCLUE shows the superiority of our proposed LTKC algorithm.