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Anytime parallel density-based clustering

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Abstract

The density-based clustering algorithm DBSCAN is a state-of-the-art data clustering technique with numerous applications in many fields. However, DBSCAN requires neighborhood queries for all objects and propagation of labels from object to object. This scheme is time consuming and thus limits its applicability for large datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel anytime approach to cope with this problem by reducing both the range query and the label propagation time of DBSCAN. Our algorithm, called AnyDBC, compresses the data into smaller density-connected subsets called primitive clusters and labels objects based on connected components of these primitive clusters to reduce the label propagation time. Moreover, instead of passively performing range queries for all objects as in existing techniques, AnyDBC iteratively and actively learns the current cluster structure of the data and selects a few most promising objects for refining clusters at each iteration. Thus, in the end, it performs substantially fewer range queries compared to DBSCAN while still satisfying the cluster definition of DBSCAN. Moreover, by processing queries in block and merging the results into the current cluster structure, AnyDBC can be efficiently parallelized on shared memory architectures to further accelerate the performance, uniquely making it a parallel and anytime technique at the same time. Experiments show speedup factors of orders of magnitude compared to DBSCAN and its fastest variants as well as a high parallel scalability on multicore processors for very large real and synthetic complex datasets.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Prof. Yufei Tao for providing us with the binary file of DBSCANR and the authors of PDSDBSCAN for making their source code available for download. Our special thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments. We appreciate the support and discussion with Sihem Amer-Yahia, Diep Phan, Jon Jacobsen, Jesper Kristensen, Ky Nguyen, Kenneth Bøgh, Sean Chester, and Manuel Ciosici during the preparation of this paper. Part of this research was funded by a Villum postdoc fellowship.

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  1. Son T. Mai

    Present address: University of Grenoble Alpes, Grenoble, France

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  1. Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark

    Son T. Mai, Ira Assent, Jon Jacobsen & Martin Storgaard Dieu

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Mai, S.T., Assent, I., Jacobsen, J. et al. Anytime parallel density-based clustering. Data Min Knowl Disc 32, 1121–1176 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10618-018-0562-1

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