A clustering algorithm based on local accumulative knowledge

Clustering as an important unsupervised learning technique is widely used to discover the inherent structure of a given data set. For clustering is depended on applications, researchers use different models to defined clustering problems. Heuristic clustering algorithm is an efficient way to deal with clustering problem defined by combining optimization model, but initialization sensitivity is an inevitable problem. In the past decades, a lot of methods have been proposed to deal with such problem. In this paper, on the contrary, we take the advantage of the initialization sensitivity to design a new clustering algorithm. We, firstly, run K-means, a widely used heuristic clustering algorithm, on data set for multiple times to generate several clustering results; secondly, propose a structure named Local Accumulative Knowledge (LAKE) to capture the common information of clustering results; thirdly, execute the Single-linkage algorithm on LAKE to generate a rough clustering result; eventually, assign the rest data objects to the corresponding clusters. Experimental results on synthetic and real world data sets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of clustering quality measures. © 2013 ACADEMY PUBLISHER