Clustering for Big Data

Analytics

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Basic Concepts and Methods

 Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts

 Partitioning Methods
 Hierarchical Methods

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What is Cluster Analysis?
 Cluster: A collection of data objects
 similar (or related) to one another within the same group

 dissimilar (or unrelated) to the objects in other groups

 Cluster analysis (or clustering, data segmentation, …)

 Finding similarities between data according to the

characteristics found in the data and grouping similar

data objects into clusters
 Unsupervised learning: no predefined classes (i.e., learning
by observations vs. learning by examples: supervised)
 Typical applications
 As a stand-alone tool to get insight into data distribution

 As a preprocessing step for other algorithms

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Application Areas: Where Clustering is
appealing for Big Data Analysis
 Big Data related to Biological domains: taxonomy of living things:
kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species
 Large documents clustering for Information retrieval
 Big Geo Data e.g., Land use: Identification of areas of similar land
use in an earth observation database
 Diverse Marketing: Help marketers discover distinct groups in their
customer bases, and then use this knowledge to develop targeted
marketing programs
 City-planning: Identifying groups of houses according to their house
type, value, and geographical location
 Earth-quake studies: Observed earth quake epicenters should be
clustered along continent faults
 Climate: understanding earth climate, find patterns of atmospheric
and ocean
 Economic Science: market research
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Clustering as a Preprocessing Tool for BDA

 Summarization:
 Preprocessing for regression, PCA, classification, and
association analysis
 Compression:
 Image processing: vector quantization
 Finding K-nearest Neighbors
 Localizing search to one or a small number of clusters
 Outlier detection
 Outliers are often viewed as those “far away” from any
cluster

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Quality: What Is Good Clustering?

 A good clustering method will produce high quality

clusters
 high intra-class similarity: cohesive within clusters
 low inter-class similarity: distinctive between clusters
 The quality of a clustering method depends on
 the similarity measure used by the method
 its implementation, and
 Its ability to discover some or all of the hidden patterns

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Measure the Quality of Clustering
 Dissimilarity/Similarity metric
 Similarity is expressed in terms of a distance function,
typically metric: d(i, j)
 The definitions of distance functions are usually rather
different for interval-scaled, boolean, categorical, ordinal
ratio, and vector variables
 Weights should be associated with different variables
based on applications and data semantics
 Quality of clustering:
 There is usually a separate “quality” function that
measures the “goodness” of a cluster.
 It is hard to define “similar enough” or “good enough”
 The answer is typically highly subjective
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Considerations for Cluster Analysis
 Partitioning criteria
 Single level vs. hierarchical partitioning (often, multi-level
hierarchical partitioning is desirable)
 Separation of clusters
 Exclusive (e.g., one customer belongs to only one region) vs.
non-exclusive (e.g., one document may belong to more than one
class)
 Similarity measure
 Distance-based (e.g., Euclidian, road network, vector) vs.
connectivity-based (e.g., density or contiguity)
 Clustering space
 Full space (often when low dimensional) vs. subspaces (often in
high-dimensional clustering)
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Data to Big Data: Requirements and Challenges
 Scalability
 Clustering all the data instead of only on samples

 Ability to deal with different types of attributes

 Numerical, binary, categorical, ordinal, linked, and mixture of these

 Constraint-based clustering
 User may give inputs on constraints
 Use domain knowledge to determine input parameters
 Interpretability and usability
 Others
 Discovery of clusters with arbitrary shape

 Ability to deal with noisy data

 Incremental clustering and insensitivity to input order

 High dimensionality

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Data to Big Data: Major Clustering Approaches (I)
 Partitioning approach:
 Construct various partitions and then evaluate them by some criterion, e.g.,

minimizing the sum of square errors

 Typical methods: k-means, k-medoids, CLARA ( Clustering Large Applications),

CLARANS(Clustering Large Applications based on RANdomized Search)

 The K-Medoids clustering technique can resolve the limitation of the K-Means algorithm
of being adversely affected by noise/outliers in the input data. But K-Medoids proves to
be a computationally costly method for considerably large values of ‘k’ (number of
clusters) and large datasets.
 The CLARA algorithm was introduced as an extension of K-Medoids. It uses only random
samples of the input data (instead of the entire dataset) and computes the best medoids
in those samples. It thus works better than K-Medoids for crowded datasets. However,
the algorithm may give wrong clustering results if one or more sampled medoids are
away from the actual best medoids.
 CLARANS algorithm takes care of the cons of both K-Medoids and CLARA algorithms
besides dealing with difficult-to-handle data mining data, i.e. spatial data. It maintains a
balance between the computational cost and the influence of data sampling on clusters’
formation.

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Major Clustering Approaches (I)

Hierarchical approach:
Create a hierarchical decomposition of the set of data
(or objects) using some criterion
Typical methods: Diana, Agnes, BIRCH (Balanced Iterative Reducing
and Clustering using Hierarchies), CAMELEON (Clustering using

dynamic modeling)
Density-based approach:
Based on connectivity and density functions
Typical methods: DBSACN, OPTICS, DenClue
Grid-based approach:
based on a multiple-level granularity structure
Typical methods: STING, WaveCluster, CLIQUE

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Major Clustering Approaches (II)
 Model-based:
 A model is hypothesized for each of the clusters and tries to find

the best fit of that model to each other

 Typical methods: EM, SOM, COBWEB

 Frequent pattern-based:
 Based on the analysis of frequent patterns

 Typical methods: p-Cluster

 User-guided or constraint-based:
 Clustering by considering user-specified or application-specific

constraints
 Typical methods: COD (obstacles), constrained clustering

 Link-based clustering:
 Objects are often linked together in various ways

 Massive links can be used to cluster objects: SimRank, LinkClus

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Chapter 10. Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts and
Methods

 Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts

 Partitioning Methods
 Hierarchical Methods

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Partitioning Algorithms: Basic Concept
 Partitioning method: Partitioning a database D of n objects into a set of k
clusters, such that the sum of squared distances is minimized (where c i is
the centroid or medoid of cluster Ci)

E   ik1 pCi ( p  ci ) 2
 Given k, find a partition of k clusters that optimizes the chosen partitioning
criterion
 Global optimal: exhaustively enumerate all partitions
 Heuristic methods: k-means and k-medoids algorithms
 k-means (MacQueen’67, Lloyd’57/’82): Each cluster is represented by
the center of the cluster
 k-medoids or PAM (Partition around medoids) (Kaufman &
Rousseeuw’87): Each cluster is represented by one of the objects in
the cluster
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The K-Means Clustering Method

 Given k, the k-means algorithm is implemented in four

steps:
 Partition objects into k nonempty subsets
 Compute seed points as the centroids of the
clusters of the current partitioning (the centroid is
the center, i.e., mean point, of the cluster)
 Assign each object to the cluster with the nearest
seed point
 Go back to Step 2, stop when the assignment does
not change

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An Example of K-Means Clustering

K=2

Arbitrarily Update the

partition cluster
objects into centroids
k groups

The initial data set Loop if Reassign objects

needed
 Partition objects into k nonempty
subsets
 Repeat
 Compute centroid (i.e., mean Update the
cluster
point) for each partition centroids
 Assign each object to the
cluster of its nearest centroid
 Until no change
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Comments on the K-Means Method

 Strength: Efficient: O(tkn), where n is # objects, k is # clusters, and t is #

iterations. Normally, k, t << n.
 Comparing: PAM: O(k(n-k)2 ), CLARA: O(ks2 + k(n-k))
 Comment: Often terminates at a local optimal.
 Weakness
 Applicable only to objects in a continuous n-dimensional space
 Using the k-modes method for categorical data
 In comparison, k-medoids can be applied to a wide range of data
 Need to specify k, the number of clusters, in advance (there are
ways to automatically determine the best k (see Hastie et al., 2009)
 Sensitive to noisy data and outliers
 Not suitable to discover clusters with non-convex shapes

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Variations of the K-Means Method

 Most of the variants of the k-means which differ in

 Selection of the initial k means
 Dissimilarity calculations
 Strategies to calculate cluster means
 Handling categorical data: k-modes
 Replacing means of clusters with modes
 Using new dissimilarity measures to deal with categorical objects
 Using a frequency-based method to update modes of clusters
 A mixture of categorical and numerical data: k-prototype method

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What Is the Problem of the K-Means Method?

 The k-means algorithm is sensitive to outliers !

 Since an object with an extremely large value may substantially
distort the distribution of the data
 K-Medoids: Instead of taking the mean value of the object in a cluster
as a reference point, medoids can be used, which is the most
centrally located object in a cluster

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PAM: A Typical K-Medoids Algorithm
Total Cost = 20
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choose k 5 each 5

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medoids 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

K=2 Randomly select a

Total Cost = 26 nonmedoid object,Oramdom
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Do loop 9

8 Compute
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Swapping O 7 total cost of 7

Until no and Oramdom 6

swapping 6

change
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If quality is 4 4

improved. 3

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The K-Medoid Clustering Method

 K-Medoids Clustering: Find representative objects (medoids) in clusters

 PAM (Partitioning Around Medoids, Kaufmann & Rousseeuw 1987)
 Starts from an initial set of medoids and iteratively replaces one
of the medoids by one of the non-medoids if it improves the total
distance of the resulting clustering
 PAM works effectively for small data sets, but does not scale well
for large data sets (due to the computational complexity)
 Efficiency improvement on PAM
 CLARA (Kaufmann & Rousseeuw, 1990): PAM on samples
 CLARANS (Ng & Han, 1994): Randomized re-sampling

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Chapter 10. Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts and
Methods
 Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts
 Partitioning Methods
 Hierarchical Methods

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Hierarchical Clustering
 Use distance matrix as clustering criteria. This method
does not require the number of clusters k as an input, but
needs a termination condition
Step 0 Step 1 Step 2 Step 3 Step 4
agglomerative
(AGNES)
a
ab
b abcde
c
cde
d
de
e
divisive
Step 4 Step 3 Step 2 Step 1 Step 0 (DIANA)
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AGNES (Agglomerative Nesting)
 Introduced in Kaufmann and Rousseeuw (1990)
 Implemented in statistical packages, e.g., Splus
 Use the single-link method and the dissimilarity matrix
 Merge nodes that have the least dissimilarity
 Go on in a non-descending fashion
 Eventually all nodes belong to the same cluster
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Dendrogram: Shows How Clusters are Merged

Decompose data objects into a several levels of nested

partitioning (tree of clusters), called a dendrogram

A clustering of the data objects is obtained by cutting

the dendrogram at the desired level, then each
connected component forms a cluster

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DIANA (Divisive Analysis)

 Introduced in Kaufmann and Rousseeuw (1990)

 Implemented in statistical analysis packages, e.g., Splus
 Inverse order of AGNES
 Eventually each node forms a cluster on its own

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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
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Centroid, Radius and Diameter of a Cluster
(for numerical data sets)
 Centroid: the “middle” of a cluster iN 1(t )
Cm  N
ip

 Radius: square root of average distance from any point

of the cluster to its centroid  N (t  cm ) 2
Rm  i 1 ip
N
 Diameter: square root of average mean squared
distance between all pairs of points in the cluster
 N  N (t  t ) 2
Dm  i 1 i 1 ip iq
N ( N 1)

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