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Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group (called cluster) are more similar (in some sense or another) to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). It is a main task of exploratory data mining, and a common technique for statistical data analysis used in many fields, including machine learning, pattern recognition, image analysis, information retrieval, and bioinformatics.
Cluster analysis itself is not one specific algorithm, but the general task to be solved. It can be achieved by various algorithms that differ significantly in their notion of what constitutes a cluster and how to efficiently find them. Popular notions of clusters include groups with small distances among the cluster members, dense areas of the data space, intervals or particular statistical distributions. Clustering can therefore be formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem. The appropriate clustering algorithm and parameter settings (including values such as the distance function to use, a density threshold or the number of expected clusters) depend on the individual data set and intended use of the results. Cluster analysis as such is not an automatic task, but an iterative process of knowledge discovery or interactive multi-objective optimization that involves trial and failure. It will often be necessary to modify data preprocessing and model parameters until the result achieves the desired properties.
Besides the term clustering, there are a number of terms with similar meanings, including automatic classification, numerical taxonomy, botryology (from Greek βότρυς "grape") and typological analysis. The subtle differences are often in the usage of the results: while in data mining, the resulting groups are the matter of interest, in automatic classification primarily their discriminative power is of interest. This often leads to misunderstandings between researchers coming from the fields of data mining and machine learning, since they use the same terms and often the same algorithms, but have different goals.
Cluster analysis was originated in anthropology by Driver and Kroeber in 1932 and introduced to psychology by Zubin in 1938 and Tryon in 1939 [1] and famously used by Cattell beginning in 1943 [2] for trait theory classification in personality psychology.
The notion of a "cluster" cannot be precisely defined,[3] which is one of the reasons why there are so many clustering algorithms. There of course is a common denominator: a group of data objects. However, different researchers employ different cluster models, and for each of these cluster models again different algorithms can be given. The notion of a cluster, as found by different algorithms, varies significantly in its properties. Understanding these "cluster models" is key to understanding the differences between the various algorithms. Typical cluster models include:
A "clustering" is essentially a set of such clusters, usually containing all objects in the data set. Additionally, it may specify the relationship of the clusters to each other, for example a hierarchy of clusters embedded in each other. Clusterings can be roughly distinguished in:
There are also finer distinctions possible, for example:
Clustering algorithms can be categorized based on their cluster model, as listed above. The following overview will only list the most prominent examples of clustering algorithms, as there are possibly over 100 published clustering algorithms. Not all provide models for their clusters and can thus not easily be categorized. An overview of algorithms explained in Wikipedia can be found in the list of statistics algorithms.
There is no objectively "correct" clustering algorithm, but as it was noted, "clustering is in the eye of the beholder."[3] The most appropriate clustering algorithm for a particular problem often needs to be chosen experimentally, unless there is a mathematical reason to prefer one cluster model over another. It should be noted that an algorithm that is designed for one kind of models has no chance on a data set that contains a radically different kind of models.[3] For example, k-means cannot find non-convex clusters.[3]
Connectivity based clustering, also known as hierarchical clustering, is based on the core idea of objects being more related to nearby objects than to objects farther away. As such, these algorithms connect "objects" to form "clusters" based on their distance. A cluster can be described largely by the maximum distance needed to connect parts of the cluster. At different distances, different clusters will form, which can be represented using a dendrogram, which explains where the common name "hierarchical clustering" comes from: these algorithms do not provide a single partitioning of the data set, but instead provide an extensive hierarchy of clusters that merge with each other at certain distances. In a dendrogram, the y-axis marks the distance at which the clusters merge, while the objects are placed along the x-axis such that the clusters don't mix.
Connectivity based clustering is a whole family of methods that differ by the way distances are computed. Apart from the usual choice of distance functions, the user also needs to decide on the linkage criterion (since a cluster consists of multiple objects, there are multiple candidates to compute the distance to) to use. Popular choices are known as single-linkage clustering (the minimum of object distances), complete linkage clustering (the maximum of object distances) or UPGMA ("Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean", also known as average linkage clustering). Furthermore, hierarchical clustering can be agglomerative (starting with single elements and aggregating them into clusters) or divisive (starting with the complete data set and dividing it into partitions).
While these methods are fairly easy to understand, the results are not always easy to use, as they will not produce a unique partitioning of the data set, but a hierarchy the user still needs to choose appropriate clusters from. The methods are not very robust towards outliers, which will either show up as additional clusters or even cause other clusters to merge (known as "chaining phenomenon", in particular with single-linkage clustering). In the general case, the complexity is , which makes them too slow for large data sets. For some special cases, optimal efficient methods (of complexity ) are known: SLINK[4] for single-linkage and CLINK[5] for complete-linkage clustering. In the data mining community these methods are recognized as a theoretical foundation of cluster analysis, but often considered obsolete. They did however provide inspiration for many later methods such as density based clustering.
Single-linkage on Gaussian data. At 35 clusters, the biggest cluster starts fragmenting into smaller parts, while before it was still connected to the second largest due to the single-link effect.
Single-linkage on density-based clusters. 20 clusters extracted, most of which contain single elements, since linkage clustering does not have a notion of "noise".
In centroid-based clustering, clusters are represented by a central vector, which may not necessarily be a member of the data set. When the number of clusters is fixed to k, k-means clustering gives a formal definition as an optimization problem: find the cluster centers and assign the objects to the nearest cluster center, such that the squared distances from the cluster are minimized.
The optimization problem itself is known to be NP-hard, and thus the common approach is to search only for approximate solutions. A particularly well known approximative method is Lloyd's algorithm,[6] often actually referred to as "k-means algorithm". It does however only find a local optimum, and is commonly run multiple times with different random initializations. Variations of k-means often include such optimizations as choosing the best of multiple runs, but also restricting the centroids to members of the data set (k-medoids), choosing medians (k-medians clustering), choosing the initial centers less randomly (K-means++) or allowing a fuzzy cluster assignment (Fuzzy c-means).
Most k-means-type algorithms require the number of clusters - - to be specified in advance, which is considered to be one of the biggest drawbacks of these algorithms. Furthermore, the algorithms prefer clusters of approximately similar size, as they will always assign an object to the nearest centroid. This often leads to incorrectly cut borders in between of clusters (which is not surprising, as the algorithm optimized cluster centers, not cluster borders).
K-means has a number of interesting theoretical properties. On the one hand, it partitions the data space into a structure known as a Voronoi diagram. On the other hand, it is conceptually close to nearest neighbor classification, and as such is popular in machine learning. Third, it can be seen as a variation of model based classification, and Lloyd's algorithm as a variation of the Expectation-maximization algorithm for this model discussed below.
K-means separates data into Voronoi-cells, which assumes equal-sized clusters (not adequate here)
K-means cannot represent density-based clusters
The clustering model most closely related to statistics is based on distribution models. Clusters can then easily be defined as objects belonging most likely to the same distribution. A nice property of this approach is that this closely resembles the way artificial data sets are generated: by sampling random objects from a distribution.
While the theoretical foundation of these methods is excellent, they suffer from one key problem known as overfitting, unless constraints are put on the model complexity. A more complex model will usually always be able to explain the data better, which makes choosing the appropriate model complexity inherently difficult.
One prominent method is known as Gaussian mixture models (using the expectation-maximization algorithm). Here, the data set is usually modeled with a fixed (to avoid overfitting) number of Gaussian distributions that are initialized randomly and whose parameters are iteratively optimized to fit better to the data set. This will converge to a local optimum, so multiple runs may produce different results. In order to obtain a hard clustering, objects are often then assigned to the Gaussian distribution they most likely belong to, for soft clusterings this is not necessary.
Distribution-based clustering is a semantically strong method, as it not only provides you with clusters, but also produces complex models for the clusters that can also capture correlation and dependence of attributes. However, using these algorithms puts an extra burden on the user: to choose appropriate data models to optimize, and for many real data sets, there may be no mathematical model available the algorithm is able to optimize (e.g. assuming Gaussian distributions is a rather strong assumption on the data).
On Gaussian-distributed data, EM works well, since it uses Gaussians for modelling clusters
Density-based clusters cannot be modeled using Gaussian distributions
In density-based clustering,[7] clusters are defined as areas of higher density than the remainder of the data set. Objects in these sparse areas - that are required to separate clusters - are usually considered to be noise and border points.
The most popular[8] density based clustering method is DBSCAN.[9] In contrast to many newer methods, it features a well-defined cluster model called "density-reachability". Similar to linkage based clustering, it is based on connecting points within certain distance thresholds. However, it only connects points that satisfy a density criterion, in the original variant defined as a minimum number of other objects within this radius. A cluster consists of all density-connected objects (which can form a cluster of an arbitrary shape, in contrast to many other methods) plus all objects that are within these objects' range. Another interesting property of DBSCAN is that its complexity is fairly low - it requires a linear number of range queries on the database - and that it will discover essentially the same results (it is deterministic for core and noise points, but not for border points) in each run, therefore there is no need to run it multiple times. OPTICS[10] is a generalization of DBSCAN that removes the need to choose an appropriate value for the range parameter , and produces a hierarchical result related to that of linkage clustering. DeLi-Clu,[11] Density-Link-Clustering combines ideas from single-linkage clustering and OPTICS, eliminating the parameter entirely and offering performance improvements over OPTICS by using an R-tree index.
The key drawback of DBSCAN and OPTICS is that they expect some kind of density drop to detect cluster borders. Moreover they can not detect intrinsic cluster structures which are prevalent in the majority of real life data. A variation of DBSCAN, EnDBSCAN[12] efficiently detects such kinds of structures. On data sets with, for example, overlapping Gaussian distributions - a common use case in artificial data - the cluster borders produced by these algorithms will often look arbitrary, because the cluster density decreases continuously. On a data set consisting of mixtures of Gaussians, these algorithms are nearly always outperformed by methods such as EM clustering, that are able to precisely model this kind of data.
Density-based clustering with DBSCAN.
DBSCAN assumes clusters of similar density, and may have problems separating nearby clusters
OPTICS is a DBSCAN variant that handles different densities much better
In recent years considerable effort has been put into improving algorithm performance of the existing algorithms.[13] Among them are CLARANS (Ng and Han, 1994),[14] and BIRCH (Zhang et al., 1996).[15] With the recent need to process larger and larger data sets (also known as big data), the willingness to trade semantic meaning of the generated clusters for performance has been increasing. This led to the development of pre-clustering methods such as canopy clustering, which can process huge data sets efficiently, but the resulting "clusters" are merely a rough pre-partitioning of the data set to then analyze the partitions with existing slower methods such as k-means clustering. Various other approaches to clustering have been tried such as seed based clustering.[16]
For high-dimensional data, many of the existing methods fail due to the curse of dimensionality, which renders particular distance functions problematic in high-dimensional spaces. This led to new clustering algorithms for high-dimensional data that focus on subspace clustering (where only some attributes are used, and cluster models include the relevant attributes for the cluster) and correlation clustering that also looks for arbitrary rotated ("correlated") subspace clusters that can be modeled by giving a correlation of their attributes. Examples for such clustering algorithms are CLIQUE[17] and SUBCLU.[18]
Ideas from density-based clustering methods (in particular the DBSCAN/OPTICS family of algorithms) have been adopted to subspace clustering (HiSC,[19] hierarchical subspace clustering and DiSH[20]) and correlation clustering (HiCO,[21] hierarchical corelation clustering, 4C[22] using "correlation connectivity" and ERiC[23] exploring hierarchical density-based correlation clusters).
Several different clustering systems based on mutual information have been proposed. One is Marina Meilă's variation of information metric;[24] another provides hierarchical clustering.[25] Using genetic algorithms, a wide range of different fit-functions can be optimized, including mutual information.[26] Also message passing algorithms, a recent development in Computer Science and Statistical Physics, has led to the creation of new types of clustering algorithms.[27]
Evaluation of clustering results sometimes is referred to as cluster validation.
There have been several suggestions for a measure of similarity between two clusterings. Such a measure can be used to compare how well different data clustering algorithms perform on a set of data. These measures are usually tied to the type of criterion being considered in assessing the quality of a clustering method.
When a clustering result is evaluated based on the data that was clustered itself, this is called internal evaluation. These methods usually assign the best score to the algorithm that produces clusters with high similarity within a cluster and low similarity between clusters. One drawback of using internal criteria in cluster evaluation is that high scores on an internal measure do not necessarily result in effective information retrieval applications.[28] Additionally, this evaluation is biased towards algorithms that use the same cluster model. For example k-Means clustering naturally optimizes object distances, and a distance-based internal criterion will likely overrate the resulting clustering.
Therefore, the internal evaluation measures are best suited to get some insight into situations where one algorithm performs better than another, but this shall not imply that one algorithm produces more valid results than another.[3] Validity as measured by such an index depends on the claim that this kind of structure exists in the data set. An algorithm designed for some kind of models has no chance if the data set contains a radically different set of models, or if the evaluation measures a radically different criterion.[3] For example, k-means clustering can only find convex clusters, and many evaluation indexes assume convex clusters. On a data set with non-convex clusters neither the use of k-means, nor of an evaluation criterion that assumes convexity, is sound.
The following methods can be used to assess the quality of clustering algorithms based on internal criterion:
One of the most common models in information retrieval (IR), the vector space model, represents a document set as a term-document matrix where each row corresponds to a term and each column corresponds to a document. Because of the use of matrices in IR, it is possible to apply linear algebra to this IR model. This paper describes an application of linear algebra to text clustering, namely, a metric for measuring cluster quality. The metric is based on the theory that cluster quality is proportional to the number of terms that are disjoint across the clusters. The metric compares the singular values of the term-document matrix to the singular values of the matrices for each of the clusters to determine the amount of overlap of the terms across clusters. Because the metric can be difficult to interpret, a standardization of the metric is defined, which specifies the number of standard deviations a clustering of a document set is from an average, random clustering of that document set. Empirical evidence shows that the standardized cluster metric correlates with clustered retrieval performance when comparing clustering algorithms or multiple parameters for the same clustering algorithm.
In external evaluation, clustering results are evaluated based on data that was not used for clustering, such as known class labels and external benchmarks. Such benchmarks consist of a set of pre-classified items, and these sets are often created by human (experts). Thus, the benchmark sets can be thought of as a gold standard for evaluation. These types of evaluation methods measure how close the clustering is to the predetermined benchmark classes. However, it has recently been discussed whether this is adequate for real data, or only on synthetic data sets with a factual ground truth, since classes can contain internal structure, the attributes present may not allow separation of clusters or the classes may contain anomalies.[30] Additionally, from a knowledge discovery point of view, the reproduction of known knowledge may not necessarily be the intended result.[30]
Some of the measures of quality of a cluster algorithm using external criterion include:
Given that there is a myriad of clustering algorithms and objectives, it is helpful to reason about clustering independently of any particular algorithm, objective function, or generative data model. This can be achieved by defining a clustering function as one that satisfies a set of properties. This is often termed as an Axiomatic System. Functions that satisfy the basic axioms are called clustering functions.[35]
A partitioning function acts on a set of points along with an integer , and pairwise distances among the points in . The points are not assumed to belong to any specific larger set or space; the pairwise distances are the only data the partitioning function has about them.[citation needed] We may label the points in using the numbers . The pairwise distances define a distance function which should have the properties of a semimetric: for any , we must have , and if and only if . In other words, the distances must be nonnegative, symmetric, and two points have distance zero if only if they are the same point.
A partitioning function takes a distance function on and an integer and returns a -partition of , a collection of non-empty disjoint subsets of whose union is . The sets making up the k-partition are the clusters. Two clustering functions are equivalent if and only if they output the same partitioning on all values of and .
Now in an effort to distinguish clustering functions from partitioning functions, we lay down some properties that one may like a clustering function to satisfy. Here is the first one. If is a distance function, then we define to be the same function with all distances multiplied by .
For any distance function , number of clusters , and scalar , we have
This property simply requires the function to be immune to stretching or shrinking the data points linearly. It effectively disallows clustering functions to be sensitive to changes in units of measurement - which is desirable. We would like clustering functions to not have any predefined hard-coded distance values in their decision process.
The next property ensures that the clustering function is “rich" in types of partitioning it could output. For a fixed and , Let Range() be the set of all possible outputs while varying .
For any number of clusters , Range() is equal to the set of all -partitions of
In other words, if we are given a set of points such that all we know about the points are pairwise distances, then for any partitioning , there should exist a such that . By varying distances amongst points, we should be able to obtain all possible -partitionings.
The next property is more subtle. We call a partitioning function “consistent" if it satisfies the following: when we shrink distances between points in the same cluster and expand distances between between points in different clusters, we get the same result. Formally, we say that is a -transformation of if (a) for all belonging to the same cluster of , we have ; and (b) for all belonging to different clusters of , we have . In other words, is a transformation of such that points inside the same cluster are brought closer together and points not inside the same cluster are moved further away from one another.
Fix . Let be a distance function, and be a -transformation of . Then
In other words, suppose that we run the partitioning function on to get back a particular partitioning . Now, with respect to , if we shrink in-cluster distances or expand between-cluster distances and run again, we should still get back the same result - namely .
The partitioning function is forced to return a fixed number of clusters: . If this were not the case, then the above three properties could never be satisfied by any function.[36] In many popular clustering algorithms such as -means, Single-Linkage, and spectral clustering, the number of clusters to be returned is determined beforehand – by the human user or other methods – and passed into the clustering function as a parameter.
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リンク元 | 「クラスター分析」「クラスター解析」「クラスタ分析」「クラスタ解析」 |
関連記事 | 「analysis」「cluster」「clustering」 |
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