Distance between Clusters X X

■ Single link: smallest distance between an element in one cluster

and an element in the other, i.e., dist(Ki, Kj) = min(tip, tjq)
■ Complete link: largest distance between an element in one cluster
and an element in the other, i.e., dist(Ki, Kj) = max(tip, tjq)
■ Average: avg distance between an element in one cluster and an
element in the other, i.e., dist(Ki, Kj) = avg(tip, tjq)
■ Centroid: distance between the centroids of two clusters, i.e.,
dist(Ki, Kj) = dist(Ci, Cj)
■ Medoid: distance between the medoids of two clusters, i.e., dist(Ki,
Kj) = dist(Mi, Mj)
■ Medoid: a chosen, centrally located object in the cluster

44
 Centroid, Radius and Diameter of a Cluster
(for numerical data sets)
■ Centroid: the “middle” of a cluster

■ Radius: square root of average distance from any point

of the cluster to its centroid

■ Diameter: square root of average mean squared

distance between all pairs of points in the cluster

45
 Extensions to Hierarchical Clustering
■ Major weakness of agglomerative clustering methods
■ Can never undo what was done previously
■ Do not scale well: time complexity of at least O(n2),
where n is the number of total objects
■ Integration of hierarchical & distance-based clustering
■ BIRCH (1996): uses CF-tree and incrementally adjusts
the quality of sub-clusters
■ CHAMELEON (1999): hierarchical clustering using
dynamic modeling
46
 Chapter 10. Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts and
Methods
■ Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts
■ Partitioning Methods
■ Hierarchical Methods
■ Density-Based Methods
■ Grid-Based Methods
■ Evaluation of Clustering
■ Summary

47
 Density-Based Clustering Methods

■ Clustering based on density (local cluster criterion), such

as density-connected points
■ Major features:
■ Discover clusters of arbitrary shape

■ Handle noise

■ One scan
■ Need density parameters as termination condition

■ Several interesting studies:

■ DBSCAN: Ester, et al. (KDD’96)

■ OPTICS: Ankerst, et al (SIGMOD’99).

■ DENCLUE: Hinneburg & D. Keim (KDD’98)

■ CLIQUE: Agrawal, et al. (SIGMOD’98) (more

grid-based)
48
 Density-Based Clustering: Basic Concepts
■ Two parameters:
■ Eps: Maximum radius of the neighbourhood
■ MinPts: Minimum number of points in an
Eps-neighbourhood of that point
■ NEps(p): {q belongs to D | dist(p,q) ≤ Eps}
■ Directly density-reachable: A point p is directly
density-reachable from a point q w.r.t. Eps, MinPts if

■ p belongs to NEps(q)
p MinPts = 5
■ core point condition:
Eps = 1 cm
|NEps (q)| ≥ MinPts q

49
 Density-Reachable and Density-Connected

■ Density-reachable:
■ A point p is density-reachable from p
a point q w.r.t. Eps, MinPts if there
p1
is a chain of points p1, …, pn, p1 = q
q, pn = p such that pi+1 is directly
density-reachable from pi
■ Density-connected
■ A point p is density-connected to a p q
point q w.r.t. Eps, MinPts if there is
a point o such that both, p and q o
are density-reachable from o w.r.t.
Eps and MinPts
50
 DBSCAN: Density-Based Spatial Clustering of
Applications with Noise
■ Relies on a density-based notion of cluster: A cluster is
defined as a maximal set of density-connected points
■ Discovers clusters of arbitrary shape in spatial databases
with noise

Outlier

Border
Eps = 1cm
Core MinPts = 5

51
 DBSCAN: The Algorithm
■ Arbitrary select a point p
■ Retrieve all points density-reachable from p w.r.t. Eps and
MinPts
■ If p is a core point, a cluster is formed
■ If p is a border point, no points are density-reachable
from p and DBSCAN visits the next point of the database
■ Continue the process until all of the points have been
processed

52
DBSCAN: Sensitive to Parameters

53
 OPTICS: A Cluster-Ordering Method (1999)

■ OPTICS: Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering

Structure
■ Ankerst, Breunig, Kriegel, and Sander (SIGMOD’99)

■ Produces a special order of the database wrt its

density-based clustering structure

■ This cluster-ordering contains info equiv to the

density-based clusterings corresponding to a broad

range of parameter settings
■ Good for both automatic and interactive cluster

analysis, including finding intrinsic clustering structure

■ Can be represented graphically or using visualization

techniques

54
 Reachability
-distance

undefined

Cluster-order
of the objects
55
 Chapter 10. Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts and
Methods
■ Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts
■ Partitioning Methods
■ Hierarchical Methods
■ Density-Based Methods
■ Grid-Based Methods
■ Evaluation of Clustering
■ Summary

56
 Grid-Based Clustering Method

■ Using multi-resolution grid data structure

■ Several interesting methods
■ STING (a STatistical INformation Grid approach) by

Wang, Yang and Muntz (1997)

■ WaveCluster by Sheikholeslami, Chatterjee, and
Zhang (VLDB’98)
■ A multi-resolution clustering approach using
wavelet method
■ CLIQUE: Agrawal, et al. (SIGMOD’98)
■ Both grid-based and subspace clustering

57
 STING: A Statistical Information Grid Approach

■ Wang, Yang and Muntz (VLDB’97)

■ The spatial area is divided into rectangular cells
■ There are several levels of cells corresponding to different
levels of resolution

58
 The STING Clustering Method
■ Each cell at a high level is partitioned into a number of
smaller cells in the next lower level
■ Statistical info of each cell is calculated and stored
beforehand and is used to answer queries
■ Parameters of higher level cells can be easily calculated
from parameters of lower level cell
■ count, mean, s, min, max

■ type of distribution—normal, uniform, etc.

■ Use a top-down approach to answer spatial data queries

■ Start from a pre-selected layer—typically with a small
number of cells
■ For each cell in the current level compute the confidence
interval
59
 STING Algorithm and Its Analysis

■ Remove the irrelevant cells from further consideration

■ When finish examining the current layer, proceed to the
next lower level
■ Repeat this process until the bottom layer is reached
■ Advantages:
■ Query-independent, easy to parallelize, incremental
update
■ O(K), where K is the number of grid cells at the lowest
level
■ Disadvantages:
■ All the cluster boundaries are either horizontal or
vertical, and no diagonal boundary is detected

60
 Chapter 10. Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts and
Methods
■ Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts
■ Partitioning Methods
■ Hierarchical Methods
■ Density-Based Methods
■ Grid-Based Methods

■ Evaluation of Clustering

■ Summary

61
 Assessing Clustering Tendency
■ Assess if non-random structure exists in the data by measuring the
probability that the data is generated by a uniform data distribution
■ Test spatial randomness by statistic test: Hopkins Static
■ Given a dataset D regarded as a sample of a random variable o,
determine how far away o is from being uniformly distributed in the
data space
■ Sample n points, p1, …, pn, uniformly from D. For each pi, find its
nearest neighbor in D: xi = min{dist (pi, v)} where v in D
■ Sample n points, q1, …, qn, uniformly from D. For each qi, find its
nearest neighbor in D – {qi}: yi = min{dist (qi, v)} where v in D and
v ≠ qi
■ Calculate the Hopkins Statistic:

■ If D is uniformly distributed, ∑ xi and ∑ yi will be close to each

other and H is close to 0.5. If D is highly skewed, H is close to 0
62
Hopkins Statistic

63
 Determine the Number of Clusters
■ Empirical method
■ # of clusters ≈√n/2 for a dataset of n points
■ Elbow method
■ Use the turning point in the curve of sum of within cluster variance
w.r.t the # of clusters

64
 Determine the Number of Clusters (2)
■ Cross validation method
■ Divide a given data set into m parts
■ Use m – 1 parts to obtain a clustering model
■ Use the remaining part to test the quality of the clustering
■ E.g., For each point in the test set, find the closest centroid, and

use the sum of squared distance between all points in the test set
and the closest centroids to measure how well the model fits the
test set
■ For any k > 0, repeat it m times, compare the overall quality measure
w.r.t. different k’s, and find # of clusters that fits the data the best

65
Cross validation method

66
 Measuring Clustering Quality

■ Two methods: extrinsic vs. intrinsic

■ Extrinsic: supervised, i.e., the ground truth is available
■ Compare a clustering against the ground truth using
certain clustering quality measure
■ Ex. BCubed precision and recall metrics
■ Intrinsic: unsupervised, i.e., the ground truth is unavailable
■ Evaluate the goodness of a clustering by considering
how well the clusters are separated, and how compact
the clusters are
■ Ex. Silhouette coefficient

67
Silhouette coefficient

68
69
 Measuring Clustering Quality: Extrinsic Methods

■ Clustering quality measure: Q(C, Cg), for a clustering C

given the ground truth Cg.
■ Q is good if it satisfies the following 4 essential criteria
■ Cluster homogeneity: the purer, the better

■ Cluster completeness: should assign objects belong to

the same category in the ground truth to the same

cluster
■ Rag bag: putting a heterogeneous object into a pure

cluster should be penalized more than putting it into a

rag bag (i.e., “miscellaneous” or “other” category)
■ Small cluster preservation: splitting a small category

into pieces is more harmful than splitting a large

category into pieces
70
 Chapter 10. Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts and
Methods
■ Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts
■ Partitioning Methods
■ Hierarchical Methods
■ Density-Based Methods
■ Grid-Based Methods

■ Evaluation of Clustering

■ Summary

71
 Summary
■ Cluster analysis groups objects based on their similarity and has
wide applications
■ Measure of similarity can be computed for various types of data
■ Clustering algorithms can be categorized into partitioning methods,
hierarchical methods, density-based methods, grid-based methods,
and model-based methods
■ K-means and K-medoids algorithms are popular partitioning-based
clustering algorithms
■ Birch and Chameleon are interesting hierarchical clustering
algorithms, and there are also probabilistic hierarchical clustering
algorithms
■ DBSCAN, OPTICS, and DENCLU are interesting density-based
algorithms
■ STING and CLIQUE are grid-based methods, where CLIQUE is also
a subspace clustering algorithm
■ Quality of clustering results can be evaluated in various ways
72