Jensen–Shannon Divergence-Based k-Medoids Clustering

Abstract

Several conventional clustering methods use the squared L2-norm as the dissimilarity. The squared L2-norm is calculated from only the object coordinates and obtains a linear cluster boundary. To extract meaningful cluster partitions from a set of massive objects, it is necessary to obtain cluster partitions that consisting of complex cluster boundaries. In this study, a JS-divergence-based k-medoids (JSKMdd) is proposed. In the proposed method, JS-divergence, which is calculated from the object distribution, is considered as the dissimilarity. The object distribution is estimated from kernel density estimation to calculate the dissimilarity based on both the object coordinates and their neighbors. Numerical experiments were conducted using five artificial datasets to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. In the numerical experiments, the proposed method was compared with the k-means clustering, k-medoids clustering, and spectral clustering. The results show that the proposed method yields better results in terms of clustering performance than other conventional methods.