A New Clustering Algorithm and Its Application in Assessing the Quality of Underground Water

Cluster analysis, which is to partition a dataset into groups so that similar elements are assigned to the same group and dissimilar elements are assigned to different ones, has been widely studied and applied in various fields. The two challenging tasks in clustering are determining the suitable number of clusters and generating clusters of arbitrary shapes. This paper proposes a new concept of “epsilon radius neighbors” which plays an essential role in the cluster-forming process, thereby determining both the number of clusters and the shape of clusters, automatically. Based on “epsilon radius neighbors,” a new clustering algorithm in which the epsilon radius value is adapted to the characteristics of each cluster in the current partition is proposed. Recently, clustering has been widely applied in environmental applications, including underground water quality monitoring. However, the existing studies have simply applied conventional clustering techniques, in which the abovementioned two challenging tasks have not been solved already. Therefore, in this paper, the proposed clustering algorithm is applied in assessing the underground water quality in Phu My Town, Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province, Vietnam. The experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. For the quality of underground water, the new algorithm results in four clusters with different characteristics. Through this application, we found that the new algorithm might provide valuable reference information for underground water management.