A Fast and More Accurate Seed-and-Extension Density-Based Clustering Algorithm

Clustering algorithms have been widely studied in many scientific areas, such as data mining, knowledge discovery, bioinformatics and machine learning. A density-based clustering algorithm, called density peaks (DP), which was proposed by Rodriguez and Laio, outperforms almost all other approaches. Although the DP algorithm performs well in many cases, there is still room for improvement in the precision of its output clusters as well as the quality of the selected centers. In this study, we propose a more accurate clustering algorithm, seed-and-extension-based density peaks (SDP). SDP selects the centers that hold the features of their clusters while building a spanning forest, and meanwhile, constructs the output clusters in a seed-and-extension manner. Experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of SDP, especially when dealing with clusters with relatively high densities. Precisely, we show that SDP is more accurate than the DP algorithm as well as other state-of-the-art clustering approaches concerning the quality of both output clusters and cluster centers while maintaining similar running time of the DP algorithm, particularly for a variety of time-series data. Moreover, SDP outperforms DP in the dynamic model in which data point insertion and deletion are allowed. From a practical perspective, the proposed SDP algorithm is obviously helpful to many application problems.