Incremental Clustering in Geography and Optimization Spaces

Abstract

Spatial clustering has been identified as an important technique in data mining owing to its various applications. In the conventional spatial clustering methods, data points are clustered mainly according to their geographic attributes. In real applications, however, the obtained data points consist of not only geographic attributes but also non-geographic ones. In general, geographic attributes indicate the data locations and non-geographic attributes show the characteristics of data points. It is thus infeasible, by using conventional spatial clustering methods, to partition the geographic space such that similar data points are grouped together. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient algorithm, named incremental clustering toward the Bound INformation of Geography and Optimization spaces, abbreviated as BINGO, to solve the problem. The proposed BINGO algorithm combines the information in both geographic and non-geographic attributes by constructing a summary structure and possesses incremental clustering capability by appropriately adjusting this structure. Furthermore, most parameters in algorithm BINGO are determined automatically so that it is easy to be applied to applications without resorting to extra knowledge. Experiments on synthetic are performed to validate the effectiveness and the efficiency of algorithm BINGO.