Robust clustering by identifying the veins of clusters based on kernel density estimation

Clustering by fast search and find of density peaks(DPC) was an efficient clustering algorithm proposed by Rodriguez and Laio [49]. It adopts a concise but effective categorizing strategy which assigns data points to the same cluster as their nearest neighbors with higher densities. However, it suffers from the so-called "chain reaction" due to the simplistic strategy. What's more, the accuracy of DPC badly depends on the selection of cut off distance d(c) when the data scale ranges. In order to take advantage of DPC whilst avoiding the drawbacks aforementioned, this paper proposed a robust clustering algorithm named IVDPC which provides a feasible approach for solving the classification problem of data with different shape and distribution. The local density is estimated through a non-parametric density estimation method first. Then, by calculating the similarity matrix of points and connecting the most resembled pairs continuously from high density regions to the edge of clusters, IVDPC identifies the main structure(veins) of clusters and classifies the rest of the samples precisely to the nearest vein. Having veins rather than one representative point to represent a cluster allows IVDPC to adjust well to the geometry of non-spherical shapes and decrease the chain reaction of DPC. The method proposed is benchmarked on artificial and real-world data sets against several baseline methods. The experimental results demonstrate that IVDPC can recognize the structure distribution of clusters and perform better in clustering accuracy over several state-of-art algorithms.