Hybrid Clustering Algorithm Based on Improved Density Peak Clustering

Abstract

In the era of big data, unsupervised learning algorithms such as clustering are particularly prominent. In recent years, there have been significant advancements in clustering algorithm research. The Clustering by Density Peaks algorithm is known as Clustering by Fast Search and Find of Density Peaks (density peak clustering). This clustering algorithm, proposed in Science in 2014, automatically finds cluster centers. It is simple, efficient, does not require iterative computation, and is suitable for large-scale and high-dimensional data. However, DPC and most of its refinements have several drawbacks. The method primarily considers the overall structure of the data, often resulting in the oversight of many clusters. The choice of truncation distance affects the calculation of local density values, and varying dataset sizes may necessitate different computational methods, impacting the quality of clustering results. In addition, the initial assignment of labels can cause a ‘chain reaction’, i.e., if one data point is incorrectly labeled, it may lead to more subsequent data points being incorrectly labeled. In this paper, we propose an improved density peak clustering method, DPC-MS, which uses the mean-shift algorithm to find local density extremes, making the accuracy of the algorithm independent of the parameter dc. After finding the local density extreme points, the allocation strategy of the DPC algorithm is employed to assign the remaining points to appropriate local density extreme points, forming the final clusters. The robustness of this method in handling uncertain dataset sizes adds some application value, and several experiments were conducted on synthetic and real datasets to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method outperforms some of the more recent methods in most cases.