A SCALABLE CLUSTERING METHOD FOR CATEGORICAL SEQUENCE DATA

Abstract

Clustering of sequences is relatively less explored but it is becoming increasingly important in data mining applications such as web usage mining and bioinformatics. The web user segmentation problem uses web access log files to partition a set of users into clusters such that users within one cluster are more similar to one another than to the users in other clusters. Similarly, grouping protein sequences that share a similar structure can help to identify sequences with similar functions. However, few clustering algorithms consider sequentiality. In this paper, we study how to cluster sequence datasets. Due to the high computational complexity of hierarchical clustering algorithms for clustering large datasets, a new clustering method is required. Therefore, we propose a new scalable clustering method using sampling and a k-nearest-neighbor method. Using a splice dataset and a synthetic dataset, we show that the quality of clusters generated by our proposed approach is better than that of clusters produced by traditional algorithms.