BigFCM: Fast, precise and scalable FCM on hadoop

Abstract

Clustering plays an important role in mining big data both as a modeling technique and a preprocessing step in many data mining process implementations. Fuzzy clustering provides more flexibility than non-fuzzy methods by allowing each data record to belong to more than one cluster to some degree. However, a serious challenge in fuzzy clustering is the lack of scalability. Massive datasets in emerging fields such as geosciences, biology, and networking do require parallel and distributed computations with high performance to solve real-world problems. Although some clustering methods are already improved to execute on big data platforms, their execution time is highly increased for gigantic datasets. In this paper, a scalable Fuzzy C-Means (FCM) clustering method named BigFCM is proposed and designed for the Hadoop distributed data platform. Based on the MapReduce programming model, the proposed algorithm exploits several mechanisms including an efficient caching design to achieve several orders of magnitude reduction in execution time. The BigFCM performance compared with Apache Mahout K-Means and Fuzzy K-Means through an evaluation framework developed in this research. Extensive evaluation using over multi-gigabyte datasets including SUSY and HIGGS shows that BigFCM is scalable while it preserves the quality of clustering.