A new clustering algorithm based on a radar scanning strategy with applications to machine learning data

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel density-based radar scanning clustering algorithm. Its main objective is to quickly discover and accurately extract individual clusters by employing the radar scanning strategy. By using this algorithm, the number of clusters does not need to be specified beforehand. Two techniques are utilized in our proposed method. First, we use a fast mean-shift algorithm with adaptive radius and active subsets to effectively locate the centers, reducing the computational time significantly. Second, we employ the shape of the probability density function of the distribution of distances between a selected point and the other points in the data set. This is performed to determine the critical parameters of the radiuses of the fast mean-shift algorithm and radiuses of clusters. The new algorithm has four merits. It reduces the computational complexity, overcomes problems caused by high dimensionality, is capable of dealing with heterogeneous spherical data sets, and lastly, is robust to noise and outliers. After applying our proposed method to several kinds of synthetic and real-world data sets, the results indicate that the density-based radar scanning algorithm is efficient and accurate.