New diagonal bundle method for clustering problems in large data sets
- Authors: Karmitsa, Napsu , Bagirov, Adil , Taheri, Sona
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: European Journal of Operational Research Vol. 263, no. 2 (2017), p. 367-379
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP140103213
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Clustering is one of the most important tasks in data mining. Recent developments in computer hardware allow us to store in random access memory (RAM) and repeatedly read data sets with hundreds of thousands and even millions of data points. This makes it possible to use conventional clustering algorithms in such data sets. However, these algorithms may need prohibitively large computational time and fail to produce accurate solutions. Therefore, it is important to develop clustering algorithms which are accurate and can provide real time clustering in large data sets. This paper introduces one of them. Using nonsmooth optimization formulation of the clustering problem the objective function is represented as a difference of two convex (DC) functions. Then a new diagonal bundle algorithm that explicitly uses this structure is designed and combined with an incremental approach to solve this problem. The method is evaluated using real world data sets with both large number of attributes and large number of data points. The proposed method is compared with two other clustering algorithms using numerical results. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.
A heuristic algorithm for solving the minimum sum-of-squares clustering problems
- Authors: Ordin, Burak , Bagirov, Adil
- Date: 2015
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Journal of Global Optimization Vol. 61, no. 2 (2015), p. 341-361
- Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DP140103213
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: Clustering is an important task in data mining. It can be formulated as a global optimization problem which is challenging for existing global optimization techniques even in medium size data sets. Various heuristics were developed to solve the clustering problem. The global k-means and modified global k-means are among most efficient heuristics for solving the minimum sum-of-squares clustering problem. However, these algorithms are not always accurate in finding global or near global solutions to the clustering problem. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm to improve the accuracy of the modified global k-means algorithm in finding global solutions. We use an auxiliary cluster problem to generate a set of initial points and apply the k-means algorithm starting from these points to find the global solution to the clustering problems. Numerical results on 16 real-world data sets clearly demonstrate the superiority of the proposed algorithm over the global and modified global k-means algorithms in finding global solutions to clustering problems.