COMP7103 Topic 3 Clustering

Author: pseudoyu | 1373 words, 7 minutes | comments | 2021-03-18 | Category: Develop

comp7103, data mining, hku

Translations: ZH

COMP7103 Data Mining

Topic 3 Clustering

Cluster Analysis

Finding groups of objects such that the objects in a group will be similar (or related) to one another and different from (or unrelated to) the objects in other groups

cluster_analysis

Application

  • Understanding
    • Group related documents for browsing, group genes and proteins that have similar functionality, or group stocks with similar price fluctuations
  • Summarization
    • Reduce size of large data sets

Types of Clusterings

  • Partitional Clustering
    • A division data objects into non-overlapping subsets (clusters) such that each data object is in exactly one subset partitional_clustering
  • Hierarchical clustering
    • A set of nested clusters organized as a hierarchical tree hierarchical_clustering
  • Other Distinctions Between Sets of Clusters
    • Exclusive versus non-exclusive
      • In non-exclusive clusterings, points may belong to multiple clusters
      • Can represent multiple classes or ‘border’ points
    • Fuzzy versus non-fuzzy
      • 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
    • Heterogeneous versus homogeneous
      • Cluster of widely different sizes, shapes, and densities

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

wellseparated_clusters

Center-based clusters

A cluster is a set of objects such that an object in a cluster is closer (more similar) to the “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

center_based_clusters

Contiguity-Based clusters

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

contiguity_based_clusters

Density-based clusters

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

density_based_clusters

Conceptual Clusters

Finds clusters that share some common property or represent a particular concept

conceptual_clusters

K-means

  • Input
    • integer k>0, set S of points in the euclidean space
  • Output
    • A (partitional) clustering of S

Step

  1. Select k points in S as the initial centroids
  2. Repeat until the centroids do not change
    • Form k clusters by assigning points to the closest centroids
    • For each cluster recompute its centroid

Feature

  • Initial centroids are often chosen randomly
  • Centroids are often the mean of the points in the cluster
  • ‘Closeness’ is measured by Euclidean distance, cosine similarity, correlation, etc.

Importance of Choosing Initial Centroids

choosing_Initial_centroids

choosing_Initial_centroids_2

choosing_Initial_centroids_3

Evaluating K-means Clusterings

  • Most common measure is Sum of Squared Error (SSE)
    • Given two clusterings, we can choose the one with smallest error
    • Decreasing K might decrease SSE
    • However, good clusterings with small K might have a lower SSE than poor clusterings with higher K

K-Means Always Terminates

  • Theorem
    • K-means with Euclidean distance as distance always terminates
    • Proof follows from the following lemmas
    • We cannot obtain the same clustering more than once, otherwise we get the same SSE value
  • Lemma 1
    • The point y that minimizes the SSE in a cluster C is the mean of all points in C
  • Lemma 2
    • SSE strictly decreases.
  • Lemma 3
  • The total number of possible clusterings is finite (< n^k).

Solutions to Initial Centroids Problem

  • Multiple runs (helps but low success probability)
  • Sample and use hierarchical clustering to determine initial centroids
  • Select more than k initial centroids and then select among these initial centroids
  • Postprocessing
  • K-Means++

Handling Empty Clusters

Basic K-means algorithm can yield less than k clusters (so called empty clusters)

  • Pick the points that contributes most to SSE and move them to empty cluster
  • Pick the points from the cluster with the highest SSE
  • If there are several empty clusters, the above can be repeated several times

Updating Centers Incrementally

  • In the basic K-means algorithm, centroids are updated after all points are assigned to a centroid
  • An alternative is to update the centroids after each assignment (incremental approach)
  • More precisely, let C1 ,C2 ,…,C k be the current clusters. Reassign all points one by one to the best cluster. Let p in C i be the current point and suppose we re-assign it to Cj . Then, after that, recompute the centroid of C i and Cj
    • Never get an empty cluster
    • Introduces an order dependency
    • More expensive

Pre-processing and Post-processing

Pre-processing

  • Normalize the data
  • Eliminate outliers

Post-processing

  • Eliminate small clusters that may represent outliers
  • Split ’loose’ clusters, i.e., clusters with relatively high SSE
  • Merge clusters that are ‘close’ and that have relatively low SSE

Limitations of K-means

  • K-means has problems when clusters are of differing
    • Sizes kmeans_limitations
    • Densities kmeans_limitations_density
    • Non-globular shapes kmeans_limitations_globular
  • K-means has problems when the data contains outliers

Overcoming K-means Limitations

Use many clusters, find parts of clusters, but need to put together

overcome_kmeans_limitations_1

overcome_kmeans_limitations_2

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 hierarchical_clustering_dendrogram

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 dendogram at the proper level
  • They may correspond to meaningful taxonomies
    • Example in biological sciences (e.g., animal kingdom, phylogeny reconstruction, …)

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 a point (or there are k clusters)

Traditional hierarchical algorithms use a similarity or distance matrix

  • Merge or split one cluster at a time

Agglomerative Clustering Algorithm

Most popular hierarchical clustering technique

  • Let each data point be a cluster
  • Compute the distance matrix n x n
  • Repeat
    • Merge the two closest clusters
    • Update distance matrix
  • Until only a single cluster remains

Procedure

  1. Start with clusters of individual points and a distance matrix n x n agglomerative_clustering_algorithm_1
  2. After some merging steps, we have some clusters agglomerative_clustering_algorithm_2
  3. We want to merge the two closest clusters (C2 and C5) and update the distance matrix agglomerative_clustering_algorithm_3
  4. The question is “How do we update the distance matrix agglomerative_clustering_algorithm_4

How to Define Inter-Cluster Similarity

  • MIN inter_cluster_similarity_1
  • MAX inter_cluster_similarity_2
  • Group Average inter_cluster_similarity_3
  • Distance Between Centroids inter_cluster_similarity_4
  • Other methods driven by an objective function
    • Ward’s Method uses squared error

Problems and Limitations

  • Once a decision is made to combine two clusters, it cannot be undone
  • No objective function is directly minimized
  • Different schemes have problems with one or more of the following
    • Sensitivity to noise and outliers
    • Difficulty handling different sized clusters and convex shapes
    • Breaking large clusters

Cluster Validity

Numerical measures that are applied to judge various aspects of cluster validity, are classified into the following three types

  • External Index
    • Used to measure the extent to which cluster labels match externally supplied class labels
      • Entropy
  • Internal Index
    • Used to measure the goodness of a clustering structure without respect to external information
      • Sum of Squared Error (SSE)
  • Relative Index
    • To compare two different clusterings or clusters
      • An external or internal index is used for this function, e.g., SSE or entropy

Internal Measures: SSE

  • Clusters in more complicated figures aren’t well separated
  • SSE is good for comparing two clusterings or two clusters (average SSE)
  • Can also be used to estimate the number of clusters

internal_measures_SSE

External Measures of Cluster Validity: Entropy

  • Definition: Entropy
    • Entropy measure how uncertain is an event, the larger the entropy the more uncertain is the event

external_measures_of_cluster_validity_Entropy

“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.”

K-means++

  • Initialize the centroids as in Algorithm 1
  • Run K-means algorithm to improve the clustering

kmeans_plus_plus_algorithm1

Algorithm Comparison

  • K-means
    • No guarantees on the quality of the solution
    • It always terminates
    • Running time could be exponential but it is OK in practice
  • K-means++
    • It always terminates
    • O(log k)-approximation on the quality of the solution
    • In practice the advantage is noticeable for large k

Related Posts

2021-02-25
COMP7103 Topic 2 Association Rules
2021-01-28
COMP7103 Topic 1 Introduction
pseudoyu

Author

pseudoyu

Backend & Smart Contract Developer, MSc Graduate in ECIC(Electronic Commerce and Internet Computing) @ The University of Hong Kong (HKU). Love to learn and build things. Follow me on GitHub


Comments