FINDIT: a fast and intelligent subspace clustering algorithm using dimension voting

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to present a novel subspace clustering method named FINDIT. Clustering is the process of finding interesting patterns residing in the dataset by grouping similar data objects from dissimilar ones based on their dimensional values. Subspace clustering is a new area of clustering which achieves the clustering goal in high dimension by allowing clusters to be formed with their own correlated dimensions. In subspace clustering, selecting correct dimensions is very important because the distance between points is easily changed according to the selected dimensions. However, to select dimensions correctly is difficult, because data grouping and dimension selecting should be performed simultaneously. FINDIT determines the correlated dimensions for each cluster based on two key ideas: dimension-oriented distance measure which fully utilizes dimensional difference information, and dimension voting policy which determines important dimensions in a probabilistic way based on V nearest neighbors' information. Through various experiments on synthetic data, FINDIT is shown to be very successful in the high dimensional clustering problem. FINDIT satisfies most requirements for good clustering methods such as accuracy of results, robustness to the noise and the cluster density, and scalability to the dataset size and the dimensionality. Moreover, it is gracefully scalable to full dimension without any modification to algorithm. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.