A Density Peak Clustering Algorithm Based on Information Bottleneck

Although density peak clustering can often easily yield excellent results, there is still room for improvement when dealing with complex, high-dimensional datasets. One of the main limitations of this algorithm is its reliance on geometric distance as the sole similarity measurement. To address this limitation, we draw inspiration from the information bottleneck theory, and propose a novel density peak clustering algorithm that incorporates this theory as a similarity measure. Specifically, our algorithm utilizes the joint probability distribution between data objects and feature information, and employs the loss of mutual information as the measurement standard. This approach not only eliminates the potential for subjective error in selecting similarity method, but also enhances performance on datasets with multiple centers and high dimensionality. To evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithm, we conducted experiments using ten carefully selected datasets and compared the results with three other algorithms. The experimental results demonstrate that our information bottleneck-based density peaks clustering (IBDPC) algorithm consistently achieves high levels of accuracy, highlighting its potential as a valuable tool for data clustering tasks.