Data Mining

Cluster Analysis: Basic Concepts

and Algorithms

Lecture Notes for Chapter 7

Introduction to Data Mining

by
Tan, Steinbach, Kumar

Introduction to Data Mining, 2nd Edition

Tan, Steinbach, Karpatne, Kumar
 What is Cluster Analysis?

 Given a set of objects, place them in groups such that the

objects in a group are similar (or related) to one another and
different from (or unrelated to) the objects in other groups

Inter-cluster
Intra-cluster distances are
distances are maximized
minimized

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Applications of Cluster Analysis
Discovered Clusters Industry Group
 Understanding Applied-Matl-DOWN,Bay-Network-Down,3-COM-DOWN,

– Group related documents 1 Cabletron-Sys-DOWN,CISCO-DOWN,HP-DOWN,

DSC-Comm-DOWN,INTEL-DOWN,LSI-Logic-DOWN,
Micron-Tech-DOWN,Texas-Inst-Down,Tellabs-Inc-Down,
Technology1-DOWN
Natl-Semiconduct-DOWN,Oracl-DOWN,SGI-DOWN,
for browsing, group genes Sun-DOWN
Apple-Comp-DOWN,Autodesk-DOWN,DEC-DOWN,

and proteins that have 2 ADV-Micro-Device-DOWN,Andrew-Corp-DOWN,

Computer-Assoc-DOWN,Circuit-City-DOWN,
Compaq-DOWN, EMC-Corp-DOWN, Gen-Inst-DOWN,
Technology2-DOWN
similar functionality, or Motorola-DOWN,Microsoft-DOWN,Scientific-Atl-DOWN
Fannie-Mae-DOWN,Fed-Home-Loan-DOWN,
group stocks with similar 3 MBNA-Corp-DOWN,Morgan-Stanley-DOWN Financial-DOWN

price fluctuations Baker-Hughes-UP,Dresser-Inds-UP,Halliburton-HLD-UP,

4 Louisiana-Land-UP,Phillips-Petro-UP,Unocal-UP,
Schlumberger-UP
Oil-UP

 Summarization
– Reduce the size of large
data sets

Clustering precipitation
in Australia

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Notion of a Cluster can be Ambiguous

How many clusters? Six Clusters

Two Clusters Four Clusters

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Types of Clusterings

 A clustering is a set of clusters

 Important distinction between hierarchical and
partitional sets of clusters
– Partitional Clustering
 A division of data objects into non-overlapping subsets (clusters)

– Hierarchical clustering
 A set of nested clusters organized as a hierarchical tree

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Partitional Clustering

Original Points A Partitional Clustering

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 Hierarchical Clustering

p1
p3 p4
p2
p1 p2 p3 p4

Traditional Hierarchical Clustering Traditional Dendrogram

p1
p3 p4
p2
p1 p2 p3 p4

Non-traditional Hierarchical Clustering Non-traditional Dendrogram

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Other Distinctions Between Sets of Clusters

 Exclusive versus non-exclusive

– In non-exclusive clusterings, points may belong to multiple
clusters.
 Can belong to multiple classes or could be ‘border’ points
– Fuzzy clustering (one type of non-exclusive)
 In fuzzy clustering, a point belongs to every cluster with some weight
between 0 and 1
 Weights must sum to 1
 Probabilistic clustering has similar characteristics
 Partial versus complete
– In some cases, we only want to cluster some of the data

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Types of Clusters

 Well-separated clusters

 Prototype-based clusters

 Contiguity-based clusters

 Density-based clusters

 Described by an Objective Function

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Types of Clusters: Well-Separated

 Well-Separated Clusters:
– A cluster is a set of points such that any point in a cluster is
closer (or more similar) to every other point in the cluster than
to any point not in the cluster.

3 well-separated clusters

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Types of Clusters: Prototype-Based

 Prototype-based
– A cluster is a set of objects such that an object in a cluster is
closer (more similar) to the prototype or “center” of a cluster,
than to the center of any other cluster
– The center of a cluster is often a centroid, the average of all
the points in the cluster, or a medoid, the most “representative”
point of a cluster

4 center-based clusters

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Types of Clusters: Contiguity-Based

 Contiguous Cluster (Nearest neighbor or

Transitive)
– A cluster is a set of points such that a point in a cluster is
closer (or more similar) to one or more other points in the
cluster than to any point not in the cluster.

8 contiguous clusters

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Types of Clusters: Density-Based

 Density-based
– A cluster is a dense region of points, which is separated by
low-density regions, from other regions of high density.
– Used when the clusters are irregular or intertwined, and when
noise and outliers are present.

6 density-based clusters

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Types of Clusters: Objective Function

 Clusters Defined by an Objective Function

– Finds clusters that minimize or maximize an objective function.
– Enumerate all possible ways of dividing the points into clusters
and evaluate the `goodness' of each potential set of clusters by
using the given objective function. (NP Hard)
– Can have global or local objectives.
 Hierarchical clustering algorithms typically have local objectives
 Partitional algorithms typically have global objectives
– A variation of the global objective function approach is to fit the
data to a parameterized model.
 Parameters for the model are determined from the data.
 Mixture models assume that the data is a ‘mixture' of a number of
statistical distributions.

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Characteristics of the Input Data Are Important

 Type of proximity or density measure

– Central to clustering
– Depends on data and application

 Data characteristics that affect proximity and/or density are

– Dimensionality
 Sparseness
– Attribute type
– Special relationships in the data
 For example, autocorrelation
– Distribution of the data

 Noise and Outliers

– Often interfere with the operation of the clustering algorithm
 Clusters of differing sizes, densities, and shapes
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Clustering Algorithms

 K-means and its variants

 Hierarchical clustering

 Density-based clustering

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K-means Clustering

 Partitional clustering approach

 Number of clusters, K, must be specified
 Each cluster is associated with a centroid (center point)
 Each point is assigned to the cluster with the closest
centroid
 The basic algorithm is very simple

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Example of K-means Clustering
Iteration 6
1
2
3
4
5
3

2.5

1.5
y

0.5

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2

x
 Example of K-means Clustering
Iteration 1 Iteration 2 Iteration 3
3 3 3

2.5 2.5 2.5

2 2 2

1.5 1.5 1.5

y

y
1 1 1

0.5 0.5 0.5

0 0 0

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x x x

Iteration 4 Iteration 5 Iteration 6

3 3 3

2.5 2.5 2.5

2 2 2

1.5 1.5 1.5

y

y
1 1 1

0.5 0.5 0.5

0 0 0

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x x x

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K-means Clustering – Details
 Simple iterative algorithm.
– Choose initial centroids;
– repeat {assign each point to a nearest centroid; re-compute cluster centroids}
– until centroids stop changing.
 Initial centroids are often chosen randomly.
– Clusters produced can vary from one run to another
 The centroid is (typically) the mean of the points in the cluster,
but other definitions are possible (see Table 7.2).
 K-means will converge for common proximity measures with
appropriately defined centroid (see Table 7.2)
 Most of the convergence happens in the first few iterations.
– Often the stopping condition is changed to ‘Until relatively few points
change clusters’
 Complexity is O( n * K * I * d )
– n = number of points, K = number of clusters,
I = number of iterations, d = number of attributes

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K-means Objective Function

 A common objective function (used with Euclidean

distance measure) is Sum of Squared Error (SSE)
– For each point, the error is the distance to the nearest cluster
center
– To get SSE, we square these errors and sum them.
K
SSE    dist 2 ( mi , x )
i 1 xCi

– x is a data point in cluster Ci and mi is the centroid (mean) for

cluster Ci
– SSE improves in each iteration of K-means until it reaches a
local or global minima.

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Two different K-means Clusterings
3

2.5

2
Original Points
1.5

y
1

0.5

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2

x

3 3

2.5 2.5

2 2

1.5 1.5
y

y
1 1

0.5 0.5

0 0

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2

x x
Optimal Clustering Sub-optimal Clustering

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Importance of Choosing Initial Centroids …
Iteration 5
1
2
3
4
3

2.5

1.5
y

0.5

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2

x
 Importance of Choosing Initial Centroids …

Iteration 1 Iteration 2
3 3

2.5 2.5

2 2

1.5 1.5
y

y
1 1

0.5 0.5

0 0

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2

x x

Iteration 3 Iteration 4 Iteration 5

3 3 3

2.5 2.5 2.5

2 2 2

1.5 1.5 1.5

y

y
1 1 1

0.5 0.5 0.5

0 0 0

-2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2 -2 -1.5 -1 -0.5 0 0.5 1 1.5 2
x x x

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Importance of Choosing Intial Centroids

 Depending on the
choice of initial
centroids, B and C
may get merged or
remain separate

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Problems with Selecting Initial Points

 If there are K ‘real’ clusters then the chance of selecting

one centroid from each cluster is small.
– Chance is relatively small when K is large
– If clusters are the same size, n, then

– For example, if K = 10, then probability = 10!/1010 = 0.00036

– Sometimes the initial centroids will readjust themselves in
‘right’ way, and sometimes they don’t
– Consider an example of five pairs of clusters

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10 Clusters Example

Iteration 4
1
2
3
8

2
y

-2

-4

-6

0 5 10 15 20
x

Starting with two initial centroids in one cluster of each pair of clusters
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10 Clusters Example
Iteration 1 Iteration 2
8 8

6 6

4 4

2 2
y

y
0 0

-2 -2

-4 -4

-6 -6

0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20
x x
Iteration 3 Iteration 4
8 8

6 6

4 4

2 2
y

y
0 0

-2 -2

-4 -4

-6 -6

0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20
x x

Starting with two initial centroids in one cluster of each pair of clusters
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 10 Clusters Example

Iteration 4
1
2
3
8

2
y

-2

-4

-6

0 5 10 15 20
x

Starting with some pairs of clusters having three initial centroids, while other
have only one.

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10 Clusters Example
Iteration 1 Iteration 2
8 8

6 6

4 4

2 2
y

y
0 0

-2 -2

-4 -4

-6 -6

0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20
Iteration
x 3 Iteration
x 4
8 8

6 6

4 4

2 2
y

y
0 0

-2 -2

-4 -4

-6 -6

0 5 10 15 20 0 5 10 15 20
x x

Starting with some pairs of clusters having three initial centroids, while other have only
one.
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Solutions to Initial Centroids Problem

 Multiple runs
– Helps, but probability is not on your side
 Use some strategy to select the k initial centroids
and then select among these initial centroids
– Select most widely separated
 K-means++ is a robust way of doing this selection
– Use hierarchical clustering to determine initial
centroids
 Bisecting K-means
– Not as susceptible to initialization issues

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K-means++

 This approach can be slower than random initialization,

but very consistently produces better results in terms of
SSE
– The k-means++ algorithm guarantees an approximation ratio
O(log k) in expectation, where k is the number of centers
 To select a set of initial centroids, C, perform the following
1. Select an initial point at random to be the first centroid
2. For k – 1 steps
3. For each of the N points, xi, 1 ≤ i ≤ N, find the minimum squared
distance to the currently selected centroids, C1, …, Cj, 1 ≤ j < k,
i.e.,
4. Randomly select a new centroid by choosing a point with probability
proportional to is
5. End For

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Bisecting K-means

 Bisecting K-means algorithm

– Variant of K-means that can produce a partitional or a
hierarchical clustering

CLUTO: http://glaros.dtc.umn.edu/gkhome/cluto/cluto/overview

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Bisecting K-means Example

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Limitations of K-means

 K-means has problems when clusters are of

differing
– Sizes
– Densities
– Non-globular shapes

 K-means has problems when the data contains

outliers.
– One possible solution is to remove outliers before
clustering

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Limitations of K-means: Differing Sizes

Original Points K-means (3 Clusters)

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Limitations of K-means: Differing Density

Original Points K-means (3 Clusters)

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Limitations of K-means: Non-globular Shapes

Original Points K-means (2 Clusters)

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Overcoming K-means Limitations

Original Points K-means Clusters

One solution is to find a large number of clusters such that each of them represents a part of a
natural cluster. But these small clusters need to be put together in a post-processing step .

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Overcoming K-means Limitations

Original Points K-means Clusters

One solution is to find a large number of clusters such that each of them represents a part of a
natural cluster. But these small clusters need to be put together in a post-processing step.

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Overcoming K-means Limitations

Original Points K-means Clusters

One solution is to find a large number of clusters such that each of them represents a part
of a natural cluster. But these small clusters need to be put together in a post-processing
step.

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Hierarchical Clustering

 Produces a set of nested clusters organized as a

hierarchical tree
 Can be visualized as a dendrogram
– A tree like diagram that records the sequences of
merges or splits

6 5
0.2
4
3 4
0.15
2
5
2
0.1

1
0.05 1
3

0
1 3 2 5 4 6

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Strengths of Hierarchical Clustering

 Do not have to assume any particular number of

clusters
– Any desired number of clusters can be obtained by
‘cutting’ the dendrogram at the proper level

 They may correspond to meaningful taxonomies

– Example in biological sciences (e.g., animal kingdom,
phylogeny reconstruction, …)

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Hierarchical Clustering

 Two main types of hierarchical clustering

– Agglomerative:
 Start with the points as individual clusters
 At each step, merge the closest pair of clusters until only one cluster
(or k clusters) left

– Divisive:
 Start with one, all-inclusive cluster
 At each step, split a cluster until each cluster contains an individual
point (or there are k clusters)

 Traditional hierarchical algorithms use a similarity or

distance matrix
– Merge or split one cluster at a time

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Agglomerative Clustering Algorithm
 Key Idea: Successively merge closest clusters
 Basic algorithm
1. Compute the proximity matrix
2. Let each data point be a cluster
3. Repeat
4. Merge the two closest clusters
5. Update the proximity matrix
6. Until only a single cluster remains

 Key operation is the computation of the proximity of two clusters

– Different approaches to defining the distance between clusters
distinguish the different algorithms

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Steps 1 and 2

 Start with clusters of individual points and a

proximity matrix p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1

p2
p3

p4
p5
.
.
. Proximity Matrix

...
p1 p2 p3 p4 p9 p10 p11 p12

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Intermediate Situation

 After some merging steps, we have some clusters

C1 C2 C3 C4 C5
C1

C2
C3
C3
C4
C4
C5

Proximity Matrix
C1

C2 C5

...
p1 p2 p3 p4 p9 p10 p11 p12

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Step 4

 We want to merge the two closest clusters (C2 and C5) and
update the proximity matrix. C1 C2 C3 C4 C5
C1

C2
C3
C3
C4
C4
C5

Proximity Matrix
C1

C2 C5

...
p1 p2 p3 p4 p9 p10 p11 p12

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Step 5

 The question is “How do we update the proximity matrix?”

C2
U
C1 C5 C3 C4

C1 ?

C2 U C5 ? ? ? ?
C3
C3 ?
C4
C4 ?

Proximity Matrix
C1

C2 U C5

...
p1 p2 p3 p4 p9 p10 p11 p12

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How to Define Inter-Cluster Distance
p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1
Similarity?
p2

p3

p4

p5
 MIN
.
 MAX .
 Group Average .
 Proximity Matrix
Distance Between Centroids
 Other methods driven by an objective
function
– Ward’s Method uses squared error

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How to Define Inter-Cluster Similarity
p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1

p2

p3

p4

p5
 MIN
.
 MAX .
 Group Average .
 Proximity Matrix
Distance Between Centroids
 Other methods driven by an objective
function
– Ward’s Method uses squared error

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How to Define Inter-Cluster Similarity
p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1

p2

p3

p4

p5
 MIN
.
 MAX .
 Group Average .
 Proximity Matrix
Distance Between Centroids
 Other methods driven by an objective
function
– Ward’s Method uses squared error

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How to Define Inter-Cluster Similarity
p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1

p2

p3

p4

p5
 MIN
.
 MAX .
 Group Average .
 Proximity Matrix
Distance Between Centroids
 Other methods driven by an objective
function
– Ward’s Method uses squared error

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How to Define Inter-Cluster Similarity
p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 ...
p1

  p2

p3

p4

p5
 MIN
.
 MAX .
 Group Average .
 Proximity Matrix
Distance Between Centroids
 Other methods driven by an objective
function
– Ward’s Method uses squared error

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MIN or Single Link

 Proximity of two clusters is based on the two

closest points in the different clusters
– Determined by one pair of points, i.e., by one link in the
proximity graph
 Example:
Distance Matrix:

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Hierarchical Clustering: MIN

5
1
3
5 0.2

2 1 0.15

2 3 6 0.1

0.05
4
4 0
3 6 2 5 4 1

Nested Clusters Dendrogram

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Strength of MIN

Original Points Six Clusters

• Can handle non-elliptical shapes

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Limitations of MIN

Two Clusters

Original Points

• Sensitive to noise
Three Clusters

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MAX or Complete Linkage

 Proximity of two clusters is based on the two

most distant points in the different clusters
– Determined by all pairs of points in the two clusters

Distance Matrix:

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Hierarchical Clustering: MAX

4 1
2 5 0.4

0.35
5
2 0.3

0.25

3 6 0.2

3 0.15
1 0.1

4 0.05

0
3 6 4 1 2 5

Nested Clusters Dendrogram

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Strength of MAX

Original Points Two Clusters

• Less susceptible to noise

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Limitations of MAX

Original Points Two Clusters

• Tends to break large clusters

• Biased towards globular clusters

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Group Average

 Proximity of two clusters is the average of pairwise proximity

between points in the two clusters.
 proximity(p , p )
piClusteri
i j

p jClusterj
proximity(Clusteri , Clusterj ) 
|Clusteri ||Clusterj |

Distance Matrix:

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Hierarchical Clustering: Group Average

5 4 1
2 0.25

5 0.2
2
0.15

3 6 0.1

1 0.05

4 0
3 3 6 4 1 2 5

Nested Clusters Dendrogram

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Hierarchical Clustering: Group Average

 Compromise between Single and Complete

Link

 Strengths
– Less susceptible to noise

 Limitations
– Biased towards globular clusters

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Cluster Similarity: Ward’s Method

 Similarity of two clusters is based on the increase

in squared error when two clusters are merged
– Similar to group average if distance between points is
distance squared

 Less susceptible to noise

 Biased towards globular clusters

 Hierarchical analogue of K-means

– Can be used to initialize K-means

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Hierarchical Clustering: Comparison

5
1 4 1
3
2 5
5 5
2 1 2
MIN MAX
2 3 6 3 6
3
1
4 4
4

5
1 5 4 1
2 2
5 Ward’s Method 5
2 2
3 6 Group Average 3 6
3
4 1 1
4 4
3

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Hierarchical Clustering: Time and Space requirements

 O(N2) space since it uses the proximity matrix.

– N is the number of points.

 O(N3) time in many cases

– There are N steps and at each step the size, N2,
proximity matrix must be updated and searched
– Complexity can be reduced to O(N2 log(N) ) time with
some cleverness

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Hierarchical Clustering: Problems and Limitations

 Once a decision is made to combine two clusters,

it cannot be undone

 No global objective function is directly minimized

 Different schemes have problems with one or

more of the following:
– Sensitivity to noise
– Difficulty handling clusters of different sizes and non-
globular shapes
– Breaking large clusters

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Density Based Clustering

 Clusters are regions of high density that are

separated from one another by regions on low
density.

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DBSCAN

 DBSCAN is a density-based algorithm.

– Density = number of points within a specified radius (Eps)

– A point is a core point if it has at least a specified number of

points (MinPts) within Eps
 These are points that are at the interior of a cluster
 Counts the point itself

– A border point is not a core point, but is in the neighborhood

of a core point

– A noise point is any point that is not a core point or a border

point

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DBSCAN: Core, Border, and Noise Points

MinPts = 7

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DBSCAN: Core, Border and Noise Points

Original Points Point types: core,

border and noise

Eps = 10, MinPts = 4

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DBSCAN Algorithm

 Form clusters using core points, and assign

border points to one of its neighboring clusters

1: Label all points as core, border, or noise points.

2: Eliminate noise points.
3: Put an edge between all core points within a distance Eps of each
other.
4: Make each group of connected core points into a separate cluster.
5: Assign each border point to one of the clusters of its associated core
points

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When DBSCAN Works Well

Original Points Clusters (dark blue points indicate noise)

• Can handle clusters of different shapes and sizes

• Resistant to noise

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When DBSCAN Does NOT Work Well

Original Points

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When DBSCAN Does NOT Work Well

(MinPts=4, Eps=9.92).

Original Points

• Varying densities
• High-dimensional data
(MinPts=4, Eps=9.75)
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DBSCAN: Determining EPS and MinPts

 Idea is that for points in a cluster, their kth nearest

neighbors are at close distance
 Noise points have the kth nearest neighbor at farther
distance
 So, plot sorted distance of every point to its kth
nearest neighbor

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Cluster Validity
 For supervised classification we have a variety of
measures to evaluate how good our model is
– Accuracy, precision, recall

 For cluster analysis, the analogous question is how to

evaluate the “goodness” of the resulting clusters?

 But “clusters are in the eye of the beholder”!

– In practice the clusters we find are defined by the clustering
algorithm

 Then why do we want to evaluate them?

– To avoid finding patterns in noise
– To compare clustering algorithms
– To compare two sets of clusters
– To compare two clusters
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 Clusters found in Random Data
1 1

0.9 0.9

0.8 0.8

0.7 0.7

Random 0.6 0.6 DBSCAN

Points 0.5
y

0.5

y
0.4 0.4

0.3 0.3

0.2 0.2

0.1 0.1

0 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
x x
1 1

0.9 0.9

K-means 0.8 0.8

Complete
0.7 0.7
Link
0.6 0.6

0.5 0.5
y

0.4 0.4

0.3 0.3

0.2 0.2

0.1 0.1

0 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
x x
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Measures of Cluster Validity
 Numerical measures that are applied to judge various aspects
of cluster validity, are classified into the following two types.
– Supervised: Used to measure the extent to which cluster labels
match externally supplied class labels.
 Entropy
 Often called external indices because they use information external to the data
– Unsupervised: Used to measure the goodness of a clustering
structure without respect to external information.
 Sum of Squared Error (SSE)
 Often called internal indices because they only use information in the data

 You can use supervised or unsupervised measures to compare

clusters or clusterings

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Unsupervised Measures: Cohesion and Separation

 Cluster Cohesion: Measures how closely related

are objects in a cluster
– Example: SSE
 Cluster Separation: Measure how distinct or well-
separated a cluster is from other clusters
 Example: Squared Error
– Cohesion is measured by the within cluster sum of squares (SSE)
𝑆𝑆 𝐸=∑ ∑ ( 𝑥− 𝑚𝑖 )
2

𝑖 𝑥 ∈𝐶
– Separation 𝑖is measured by the between cluster sum of squares
𝑆𝑆𝐵=∑ |𝐶 𝑖|( 𝑚− 𝑚𝑖 )
2

𝑖
Where is the size of cluster i

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Unsupervised Measures: Cohesion and
Separation

 Example: SSE
– SSB + SSE = constant
m
  
1 m1 2 3 4 m2 5

K=1 cluster: 𝑆𝑆𝐸 = ( 1 − 3 )2 + ( 2 − 3 )2+ ( 4 − 3 ) 2+ (5 − 3 ) 2 =10

𝑆𝑆𝐵 = 4 × ( 3− 3 )2 =0
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙=10 +0=10
K=2 clusters: 𝑆𝑆𝐸 = (1 − 1.5 )2 + ( 2 − 1.5 )2 + ( 4 − 4.5 )2+ ( 5 − 4.5 )2=1
2 2
𝑆𝑆𝐵 =2 × ( 3 − 1.5 ) +2 × ( 4.5 − 3 ) =9
𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙=1+ 9=10

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Unsupervised Measures: Cohesion and Separation

 A proximity graph-based approach can also be used for

cohesion and separation.
– Cluster cohesion is the sum of the weight of all links within a cluster.
– Cluster separation is the sum of the weights between nodes in the cluster
and nodes outside the cluster.

cohesion separation

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Unsupervised Measures: Silhouette Coefficient

 Silhouette coefficient combines ideas of both cohesion and

separation, but for individual points, as well as clusters and clusterings
 For an individual point, i
– Calculate a = average distance of i to the points in its cluster
– Calculate b = min (average distance of i to points in another cluster)
– The silhouette coefficient for a point is then given by

s = (b – a) / max(a,b) Distances used

to calculate b
i
– Value can vary between -1 and 1 Distances used
to calculate a
– Typically ranges between 0 and 1.
– The closer to 1 the better.

 Can calculate the average silhouette coefficient for a cluster or a

clustering

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Measuring Cluster Validity Via Correlation
 Two matrices
– Proximity Matrix
– Ideal Similarity Matrix
 One row and one column for each data point
 An entry is 1 if the associated pair of points belong to the same cluster
 An entry is 0 if the associated pair of points belongs to different clusters
 Compute the correlation between the two matrices
– Since the matrices are symmetric, only the correlation between
n(n-1) / 2 entries needs to be calculated.
 High magnitude of correlation indicates that points that
belong to the same cluster are close to each other.
– Correlation may be positive or negative depending on whether
the similarity matrix is a similarity or dissimilarity matrix
 Not a good measure for some density or contiguity based
clusters.
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Measuring Cluster Validity Via Correlation

 Correlation of ideal similarity and proximity

matrices for the K-means clusterings of the
following well-clustered data set.
1 1 1

0.9 10 0.9 10 0.9

0.8 20 0.8 20 0.8

0.7 30 0.7 30 0.7

0.6 40 0.6 40 0.6

Points

Points
0.5 50 0.5 50 0.5
y

0.4 60 0.4 60 0.4

0.3 70 0.3 70 0.3

0.2 80 0.2 80 0.2

0.1 90 0.1 90 0.1

0 100 0 100 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 20 40 60 80 100Similarity 20 40 60 80 100 Similarity
x Points Points

Corr = 0.9235

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Measuring Cluster Validity Via Correlation

 Correlation of ideal similarity and proximity

matrices for the K-means clusterings of the
following random data set.
1 1 1

0.9 10 0.9 10 0.9

0.8 20 0.8 20 0.8

0.7 30 0.7 30 0.7

0.6 40 0.6 40 0.6

Points

Points
0.5 50 0.5 50 0.5
y

0.4 60 0.4 60 0.4

0.3 70 0.3 70 0.3

0.2 80 0.2 80 0.2

0.1 90 0.1 90 0.1

0 100 0 100 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 20 40 60 80 100Similarity 20 40 60 80 100 Similarity
x Points Points

K-means Corr = 0.5810

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Judging a Clustering Visually by its Similarity Matrix

 Order the similarity matrix with respect to cluster

labels and inspect visually.

1
1
10 0.9
0.9
20 0.8
0.8
30 0.7
0.7
40 0.6
0.6

Points
50 0.5
0.5
y

60 0.4
0.4
70 0.3
0.3
80 0.2
0.2
90 0.1
0.1
100 0
0 20 40 60 80 100Similarity
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Points
x

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Judging a Clustering Visually by its Similarity Matrix

 Clusters in random data are not so crisp

1
1
0.9 10 0.9

0.8 20 0.8

0.7 30 0.7

0.6 40 0.6

Points
0.5
y

50 0.5

0.4 60 0.4

0.3 70 0.3

0.2 80 0.2

0.1 90 0.1

0 100 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 20 40 60 80 100Similarity
x Points

DBSCAN

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Judging a Clustering Visually by its Similarity
Matrix

0.9
500
0.8

1 0.7
2 6 1000
0.6
3
4
1500 0.5

0.4
5 2000
0.3
7
0.2
2500
0.1

3000 0
500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000

DBSCAN

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Determining the Correct Number of Clusters

 SSE is good for comparing two clusterings or two clusters

 SSE can also be used to estimate the number of clusters

10

6 9

8
4
7
2 6

SSE
0 5

4
-2
3
-4 2

-6 1

5 10 15 0
2 5 10 15 20 25 30
K

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Determining the Correct Number of Clusters

 SSE curve for a more complicated data set

1
2 6

3
4

SSE of clusters found using K-means

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Supervised Measures of Cluster Validity: Entropy and Purity

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Assessing the Significance of Cluster Validity Measures

 Need a framework to interpret any measure.

– For example, if our measure of evaluation has the value, 10, is that
good, fair, or poor?
 Statistics provide a framework for cluster validity
– The more “atypical” a clustering result is, the more likely it represents
valid structure in the data
– Compare the value of an index obtained from the given data with those
resulting from random data.
 If the value of the index is unlikely, then the cluster results are valid

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Statistical Framework for SSE

 Example
– Compare SSE of three cohesive clusters against three clusters in
random data
1
50
0.9
45
0.8
40
0.7
35
0.6
30

Count
0.5
y

25
0.4
20
0.3
15
0.2
10
0.1
5
0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0
0.016 0.018 0.02 0.022 0.024 0.026 0.028 0.03 0.032 0.034
x SSE

SSE = 0.005 Histogram shows SSE of three clusters in 500 sets of random
data points of size 100 distributed over the range 0.2 – 0.8 for
x and y values

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Statistical Framework for Correlation

 Correlation of ideal similarity and proximity matrices

for the K-means clusterings of the following two data
sets.
1 1

0.9 0.9

0.8 0.8

0.7 0.7

0.6 0.6

0.5 0.5
y

0.4 0.4

0.3 0.3

0.2 0.2

0.1 0.1

0 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
x x

Histogram of correlation for 500

random data sets of size 100 with
Corr = -0.9235 Corr = -0.5810 x and y values of points between
Correlation is negative because it is calculated between a distance 0.2 and 0.8.
matrix and the ideal similarity matrix. Higher magnitude is better.

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Final Comment on Cluster Validity

“The validation of clustering structures is the most

difficult and frustrating part of cluster analysis.
Without a strong effort in this direction, cluster
analysis will remain a black art accessible only to
those true believers who have experience and
great courage.”
Algorithms for Clustering Data, Jain and Dubes
 H. Xiong and Z. Li. Clustering Validation Measures. In C. C. Aggarwal and C. K. Reddy,
editors, Data Clustering: Algorithms and Applications, pages 571–605. Chapman &
Hall/CRC, 2013.

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