| Abstract CURE: An Efficient Clustering Algorithm for Large Databases (2008) | |||||||||||||||
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| Clustering, in data mining, is useful for discovering groups and identifying interesting distributions in the underlying data. Traditional clustering algorithms either favor clusters with spherical shapes and similar sizes, or are very frag-ile in the presence of outliers. We propose a new cluster-ing algorithm called CURE that is more robust to outliers, and identifies clusters having non-spherical shapes and wide variances in size. CURE achieves this by representing each cluster by a certain fixed number of points that are gen-erated by selecting well scattered points from the cluster and then shrinking them toward the center of the cluster by a specified fraction. Having more than one representa-tive point per cluster allows CURE to adjust well to the geometry of non-spherical shapes and the shrinking helps to dampen the effects of outliers. To handle large databases, CURE employs a combination of random sampling and par-titioning. A random sample drawn from the data set is first partitioned and each partition is partially clustered. The partial clusters are then clustered in a second pass to yield the desired clusters. Our experimental results confirm that the quality of clusters produced by CURE is much better than those found by existing algorithms. Furthermore, they demonstrate that random sampling and partitioning enable CURE to not only outperform existing algorithms but also to scale well for large databases without sacrificing cluster-ing quality. 1 | |||||||||||||||
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