Clustering by data competition

Abstract

Clustering analysis is an unsupervised method to find out hidden structures in datasets. Most partitional clustering algorithms are sensitive to the selection of initial exemplars, the outliers and noise. In this paper, a novel technique called data competition algorithm is proposed to solve the problems. First the concept of aggregation field model is defined to describe the partitional clustering problem. Next, the exemplars are identified according to the data competition. Then, the members will be assigned to the suitable clusters. Data competition algorithm is able to avoid poor solutions caused by unlucky initializations, outliers and noise, and can be used to detect the coexpression gene, cluster the image, diagnose the disease, distinguish the variety, etc. The provided experimental results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed schemes and show that the proposed approach of data competition algorithm is simple, stable and efficient. The experimental results also show that the proposed approach of data competition clustering outperforms three of the most well known clustering algorithms K-means clustering, affinity propagation clustering, hierarchical clustering.