Density-based Clustering Methods Research Articles

Unsupervised dynamic prognostics for abnormal degradation of lithium-ion battery

Lithium-ion batteries may suffer an abnormal degradation defined by a significantly accelerated performance drop after a period of linear and low-rate degradation, resulting in severe danger to operational safety and reliability. Existing supervised data-driven prognostics for abnormal degradation rely heavily on adequate high-quality training samples, thus hindering their real-world utilization. Therefore, this paper develops an unsupervised dynamic prognostics framework that is dynamically executed as the cycle number increases to provide accurate and timely warnings for abnormal degradation. In the framework, an extended asymmetric quantum clustering (EAQC) can preliminarily identify the risky battery with the abnormal degradation trend. Its use of multi-dimensional feature degradation rates and potential function for clustering makes it outperform other density-based clustering methods. Then, for the identified battery, a time-varying double-layer autoregression (TVDLAR) can accurately predict its knee point of abnormal degradation. TVDLAR produces much earlier warning than other autoregression methods, which owes to its modeling ability of the time-varying correlation in battery historical degradation data. Through applying to two experimental datasets consisting of 174 lithium-ion batteries of different types under various working conditions, the framework is proven highly effective and shows significant superiority over some alternative approaches; all abnormal degradation can be timely warned before the corresponding knee points, and the average earlier warning cycles are 86 and 116, respectively. Compared with supervised data-driven methods, the proposed unsupervised dynamic prognostics framework has the advantages of low data requirement, low computational consumption, and good interpretability, indicating its substantial potential for application.

High-density cluster core-based [formula omitted]-means clustering with an unknown number of clusters

The k-means algorithm, known for its simplicity and adaptability, faces challenges related to manual cluster number selection and sensitivity to initial centroid placement. This paper introduces an innovative framework aimed at overcoming these challenges. By proposing a data-driven cluster number estimation method and a robust initialization strategy based on high-density cluster cores, our approach revolutionizes k-means, unlocking its full unsupervised potential and ensuring superior performance, even in scenarios involving overlapping clusters. The method employs a novel density-based technique to accurately identify cluster cores, resulting in substantial improvements over existing methods. Rigorous experimentation on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates an average performance enhancement of 15% in terms of the Adjusted Rand Index for datasets with overlapping clusters, surpassing the capabilities of state-of-the-art density-based clustering methods and traditional k-means. Moreover, our method autonomously determines the optimal number of clusters, facilitating true unsupervised learning and eliminating the impact of initial centroid placement on clustering outcomes. This leads to stable and consistent results, addressing key limitations of the conventional k-means algorithm. The practical applicability of our approach is exemplified in image segmentation tasks, showcasing its versatility and reliability in real-world scenarios.

An optimized denoising method for ICESat-2 photon-counting data considering heterogeneous density and weak connectivity

The Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) can obtain underwater elevation due to its strong penetration ability. However, the photons recorded by ICESat-2 include a large amount of noise that needs to be removed. Although density-based clustering methods can finish signal photon extraction, heterogeneous density and weak connectivity in photon data distribution impede their denoising performance, especially for sparse signals in deep water and drastic topographic change areas. In this paper, a novel fused denoising method based on the local outlier factor and inverse distance metric is proposed to overcome the above problems. The local outlier factor and inverse distance metric are calculated based on K-nearest neighbors (KNNs), taking into account not only the difference in density but also the directional uniformity of the data distribution. Using six trajectories under various seabed topographies, the proposed method is compared with state-of-the-art ICESat-2 photon denoising algorithms and official ATL03 results. The results indicate that the overall accuracy of the proposed method can surpass 96%, and the proposed method maintains higher recall but also has a lower false positive rate. Compared with the results of other methods, the proposed method can better adopt areas with abrupt topographic changes and deep water. The extracted signal strips are more unbroken and continuous. This study can contribute to pioneering a new perspective for ICESat-2 photon-counting data denoising research that is limited to using only density-based algorithms.

The impact of clustering strategies to site integrated community energy and harvesting systems on electrical demand and regional GHG reductions

The current work examines the Integrated Community Energy and Harvesting system (ICE-Harvest), an integration of thermal and electrical distributed energy resources. The system prioritizes the harvesting of community waste energy resources—for example, residual heat rejected from cooling processes and peak electricity fossil-fuel fired generators, as well as energy from curtailed clean grid electricity resources—to help in satisfying the heating demands of commercial and residential buildings. As such, ICE-Harvest systems provide a solution that can minimize greenhouse gas emissions from high-energy-consumption buildings in cold-climate regions such as North America and Northern Europe. The current work focuses on where to locate these systems and introduces different clustering methods for integrated energy systems that focus on thermal load diversity among buildings in each cluster. In the first technique, buildings with the highest amount of rejected heat from their cooling systems (anchor buildings) are clustered with nearby high heating demands buildings to create a large opportunity for harvesting wasted energy however, buildings not located close to anchor buildings are clustered using density-based clustering methods. The energy harvesting capabilities of this technique are compared to those provided by full DB clustering without specifying the anchor buildings, as well as to full density-based clustering with a post-processing step in which the nearest anchor building is added to each cluster. The selected clustering method also demonstrates the grid level potential of the ICE-Harvest systems to impact greenhouse gas emissions, heating, and electricity consumption by presenting a reduced model for the ICE-Harvest system that can be applied to any number of clusters on a municipal or provincial/state scale. Specifically, the model is applied to a database of 14,832 high-energy-consumption buildings with the potential for forming 1,139 clusters in the province of Ontario, Canada. The results of this case study reveal that density-based clustering with post processing resulted in the largest emission reduction per unit piping network length of 360 t CO2eq /km/year. In addition, the use of ICE-Harvest systems can displace the energy required from the gas-fired heating resources by 11 TWh, accounting for over 70% of the clusters’ total heating requirements. This results in a 1.9 Mt CO2eq reduction in overall sites’ emissions, which represents around 60% of the clusters’ emissions.

Towards lowering computational power in IoT systems: Clustering algorithm for high-dimensional data stream using entropy window reduction

In a world of connectivity empowered by the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT), an infinite number of data streams have emerged. Thus, data stream clustering is crucial for extracting hidden knowledge and data mining. Various data stream clustering methods have lately been introduced. Yet, the majority of such algorithms are affected by the curse of high dimensionality. Lately, a fully online buffer-based clustering algorithm for handling evolving data streams (BOCEDS) was developed. Similarly to other existing density-based clustering methods, BOCEDS is not capable of handling high-dimensional data and has high computational power and high memory utilization. This paper introduces an Entropy Window Reduction (EWR) algorithm, which is an improved version of the BOCEDS technique. EWR is a fully online clustering technique for handling high-dimensional data streams using feature ranking and sorting. This process is accomplished by calculating the entropy of specific features with respect to the time window. The findings of the experiments are compared to the outcomes of BOCEDS, CEDAS, and MuDi-Stream algorithms. The outcomes indicate that the EWR algorithm outperformed the baseline clustering algorithms. The results are demonstrated using the KDDCup’99 dataset in terms of quality and complexity evaluation on the average of F-Measures, Jaccard Index, Fowlkes–Mallows index, Purity, and Rand Index as well as the memory usage and computational power with 88%, 66%, 81%, 100%, and 66%, respectively. The results also show low memory usage and computing power in comparison with the baseline algorithms.

Fast density estimation for density-based clustering methods

Density-based clustering algorithms are widely used for discovering clusters in pattern recognition and machine learning. They can deal with non-hyperspherical clusters and are robust to outliers. However, the runtime of density-based algorithms is heavily dominated by neighborhood finding and density estimation which is time-consuming. Meanwhile, the traditional acceleration methods using indexing techniques such as KD-tree may not be effective when the dimension of the data increases. To address these issues, this paper proposes a fast range query algorithm, called Fast Principal Component Analysis Pruning (FPCAP), with the help of the fast principal component analysis technique in conjunction with geometric information provided by the principal attributes of the data. Based on FPCAP, a framework for accelerating density-based clustering algorithms is developed and successfully applied to accelerate the Density Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) algorithm and the BLOCK-DBSCAN algorithm, and improved DBSCAN (called IDBSCAN) and improved BLOCK-DBSCAN (called BLOCK-IDBSCAN) are then obtained, respectively. IDBSCAN and BLOCK-IDBSCAN preserve the advantage of DBSCAN and BLOCK-DBSCAN, respectively, while greatly reducing the computation of redundant distances. Experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves the computational efficiency significantly.

Who controls U.S. politics? An analysis of major political endorsements in U.S. midterm elections

In this study, we investigated the underlying patterns, rationales, and effects of major political endorsements in the United States midterm elections, specifically focusing on the endorsement patterns and impacts of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the 2018 and 2020 midterms. In order to uncover such patterns, we examined five demographic variables (Cook's Partisan Voter Index (PVI), bachelor’s degree attainment, percentage white, percentage aged 65 and above, and median income) as well as two candidate-specific variables (incumbency and progressivity). Through employing density-based clustering methods and logistic regressions, we discovered a dichotomy of pragmatic and ideological endorsements in U.S. politics. We thus hypothesized that all political endorsements can be predicted by a combination of ideological and demographic factors, and fall somewhere along the dichotomy. Trump's endorsements were 97% predictable through logistic regressions on demographic variables alone, with PVI contributing the majority (55%) and education level contributing 28%; meanwhile, Sanders' endorsements were only 67% demographically predictable, but 80% predictable through the progressivity of individual candidates alone. We therefore concluded a trend of Trump basing his endorsements upon state demographics instead of individual candidates, and Sanders endorsing based on whether or not candidates align with a progressive ideology. Using a support vector machine model for binary classification, we found that Trump's and Sanders' endorsements contributed 11% and 6% to election victories of their respective endorsed candidates, significantly behind factors such as PVI (38%), bachelor’s attainment (25%) and incumbency (14%), justifying trends such as Congressional stagnation, widening educational disparities in electorates, and political polarization.

KNN Based Denoising Algorithm for Photon-Counting LiDAR: Numerical Simulation and Parameter Optimization Design

Photon-counting LiDAR can obtain long-distance, high-precision target3D geographic information, but extracting high-precision signal photons from background noise photons is the key premise of photon-counting LiDAR data processing and application. This study proposes an adaptive noise filtering algorithm that adjusts parameters according to the background photon count rate and removes noise photons based on the local mean Euclidean distance. A simulated photon library that provides different background photon count rates and detection probabilities was constructed. It was then used to fit the distribution relationship between the background photon count rate and the average KNN (K-Nearest Neighbor) distance (k = 2–6) and to obtain the optimal denoising threshold under different background photon count rates. Finally, the proposed method was evaluated by comparing it with the modified density-based spatial clustering (mDBSCAN) and local distance-based statistical methods. The experimental results show that various methods are similar when the background noise rate is high. However, at most non-extreme background photon count rate levels, the F of this algorithm was maintained between 0.97–0.99, which is an improvement over other classical algorithms. The new strategy eliminated the artificial introduction of errors. Due to its low error rates, the proposed method can be widely applied in photon-counting LiDAR signal extraction under various conditions.

A geometric-based clustering method using natural neighbors

Neighborhood-based and density-based clustering methods are applied in various data analysis applications. However, most of them have low performance in mixed heterogeneous datasets, and high computational cost. To mitigate these challenges, in this paper, a geometric-based clustering method is proposed which uses the concept of natural neighborhoods to extract the local density of data points. At the first stage of the algorithm, primary clusters are formed by identifying dense points that have a higher number of natural neighbors. Then, the heads of the clusters are extracted in dense points, based on the local natural density criterion. Afterward, a novel natural neighborhood-based method is applied to identify the points having a low number of natural neighbors, which called weak or noise data points. Finally, the desired clusters are obtained by ignoring the weak/noise points. The computational complexity of the proposed method is O(nlogn). The proposed method is independent of any specific parameter setting. The results of experiments on benchmark datasets confirm that it achieves a higher performance compared to the competitors.

Advanced Clustering Techniques for Emotional Grouping in Learning Environments Using an AR-Sandbox

Recently, it has been proven that the emotional aspect directly influences the learning process, so that, based on data mining techniques, this behavior has been sought to be characterized. This has made clustering techniques become one of the most used techniques for this purpose. However, studies where emotional data obtained from a person’s brain activity are used, are rare. For this reason, the present study aims to implement and compare advanced clustering techniques based on emotional metrics obtained through Brain-Computer Interfaces, captured in an AR-Sandbox, which fulfills the role of a learning environment. The evaluation of these techniques is carried out using internal criteria such as silhouette coefficient, Composed Density Between and within, Calinski-Harabasz and other statistical measures. When carrying out this study, it was obtained as a result that, the Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Application with Noise and Density-Based Hierarchical Spatial Clustering of Noisy Applications algorithms as the Density-based clustering methods, presented a better level of well-separation, cohesion and compaction, in comparison to the rest of the techniques implemented.

Clustering with density based initialization and Bhattacharyya based merging

Centroid based clustering approaches, such as k-means, are relatively fast but inaccurate for arbitrary shape clusters. Fuzzy c-means with Mahalanobis distance can accurately identify clusters if data set can be modelled by a mixture of Gaussian distributions. However, they require number of clusters apriori and a bad initialization can cause poor results. Density based clustering methods, such as DBSCAN, overcome these disadvantages. However, they may perform poorly when the dataset is imbalanced. This paper proposes a clustering method, named clustering with density initialization and Bhattacharyya based merging based on the fuzzy clustering. The initialization is carried out by density estimation with adaptive bandwidth using k-Nearest Orthant-Neighbor algorithm to avoid the effects of imbalanced clusters. The local peaks of the point clouds constructed by the k-Nearest Orthant-Neighbor algorithm are used as initial cluster centers for the fuzzy clustering. We use Bhattacharyya measure and Jensen inequality to find overlapped Gaussians and merge them to form a single cluster. We carried out experiments on a variety of datasets and show that the proposed algorithm has remarkable advantages especially for imbalanced and arbitrarily shaped data sets.

WBBA-KM: A Hybrid Weight-Based Bat Algorithm with K-Means Algorithm For Cluster Analysis

Data clustering is an unsupervised classification method used to classify unlabeled objects into clusters. The clustering is performed by partitioning clustering, hierarchical clustering, fuzzy clustering, and density-based clustering methods. However, the center of the clusters is updated according to local searches with these traditional methods, and finding the best clusters center affects the clustering performance positively. In this study, a variant bat algorithm called weight-based bat algorithm (WBBA) is proposed and the proposed WBBA hybridized with the k-means clustering method (WBBA-KM) to determine the optimal centers of the clusters. The performance of the proposed WBBA-KM has been evaluated by using six different benchmark datasets from the UCI repository and the obtained results are compared with FCM, IFCM, KFCM, KIFCM, PSO-IFCM, GA-IFCM, ABC-IFCM, PSO-KIFCM, GA-KIFCM, ABC-KIFCM, and BA-KM clustering methods in the literature. According to the experimental results, the proposed WBBA-KM clustering method performed better performance from all other clustering methods in 4 of 6 benchmark datasets and achieved better performance from the BA-KM clustering method in all benchmark datasets.

Trip end identification based on spatial-temporal clustering algorithm using smartphone positioning data

As a widespread portable probe, smartphone equipped with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) can continuously track individual’s travel trajectory, it is potential for trip end information identification. Existing studies mostly use rule-based methods with specific dwelling time and distance thresholds for trip end detection, these methods are highly dependent on expert experience and lack universality across different traffic environments. Some density-based spatial clustering methods also have issues in the case of GNSS signal missing, traffic congestion, short-time stays and repeat visits to the same place etc. Therefore, this paper proposes a two-step method for trip end identification by using smartphone GNSS positioning data. First, a spatial-temporal density-based clustering algorithm (ST-DBCA) is proposed for trip end identification, the method considers both spatial and temporal travel trajectory point density at the same time, and performs much better than traditional clustering methods. Second, three optimization models are further proposed to optimize the identification results, including 1) a short time stay optimization model, 2) a redundant stay optimization model, and 3) a traffic congestion stay optimization model. Field tests in Chengdu China are conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed methods. Results show that the average trip end identification accuracy under different trip purposes reaches 92.8%, and the average errors of arrival and departure time are smaller than 150 s.

An unsupervised gene selection method based on multivariate normalized mutual information of genes

Gene expression data analysis has always been challenging due to complex and high-dimensional samples and genes. Generally, the number of samples is much smaller than the number of genes in microarray gene expression data. Handling this imbalance data as machine learning tasks have the risk of generating an over-fitted learning model, reducing predictability, and unreadability of genetic data. These problems can be significantly decreased by choosing the more informative genes. Unsupervised gene selection techniques can estimate the relation among genes well. Though using mutual information and symmetric uncertainty can estimate the genes' relevancy well, their bivariate measures ignore the possible dependencies among several genes. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised gene selection scheme based on information theoretic measures. It uses a similarity-based algorithm for gene clustering and then introduces some virtual genes as representatives of gene clusters. These representative genes will have the most common information with the genes in clusters and the least similarity with the representatives of other clusters. The experimental results on benchmark microarray gene expression datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, as compared to some information theoretic schemes beside to prototype- and density-based clustering methods in both unsupervised and supervised scenarios.

A framework for monitoring movements of pandemic disease patients based on GPS trajectory datasets

The rapid spread of contagious diseases poses a colossal threat to human existence. Presently, the emergence of coronavirus COVID-19 which has rightly been declared a global pandemic resulting in so many deaths, confusion as well as huge economic losses is a challenge. It has been suggested by the World Health Organization (WHO) in conjunction with different Government authorities of the world and non-governmental organizations, that efforts to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic should rely principally on measures such as social distancing, identification of infected persons, tracing of possible contacts as well as effective isolation of such person(s) for subsequent medical treatment. The aim of this study is to provide a framework for monitoring Movements of Pandemic Disease Patients and predicting their next geographical locations given the recent trend of infected COVID-19 patients absconding from isolation centres as evidenced in the Nigerian case. The methodology for this study, proposes a system architecture incorporating GPS (Global Positioning System) and Assisted-GPS technologies for monitoring the geographical movements of COVID-19 patients and recording of their movement Trajectory Datasets on the assumption that they are assigned with GPS-enabled devices such as smartphones. Accordingly, fifteen (15) participants (patients) were selected for this study based on the criteria of residency and business activity location. The ensuing participants movements generated 157, 218 Trajectory datasets during a period of 3 weeks. With this dataset, mining of the movement trace, Stay Points (hot spots), relationships, and the prediction of the next probable geographical location of a COVID-19 patient was realized by the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Data Mining techniques such as supervised Machine Learning (ML) algorithms (i.e., Multiple Linear Regression (MLR), k-Nearest Neighbor (kNN), Decision Tree Regression (DTR), Random Forest Regression (RFR), Gradient Boosting Regression (GBR), and eXtreme Gradient Boosting regression(XGBR) as well as density-based clustering methods (i.e., DBSCAN) for the computation of Stay Points (hot spots) of COVID-19 patient. The result of this study showed clearly that it is possible to determine the Stay Points (hot spots) of a COVID-19 patient. In addition, this study demonstrated the possibility of predicting the next probable geographical location of a COVID-19 patient. Correspondingly, Six Machine Learning models (i.e., MLR, kNN, DTR, RFR, GBR, and XGBR) were compared for efficiency, in determining the next probable location of a COVID-19 patient. The result showed that the DTR model performed better compared to other models (i.e., MLR, kNN, RFR, GBR, XGBR) based on four evaluation matrices (i.e., ACCURACY, MAE, MSE, and R2) used. It is recommended that less developed Countries consider adopting this framework as a policy initiative for implementation at this burgeoning phase of COVID-19 infection and beyond. The same applies to the developed Countries. There is indication that GPS Trajectory dataset and Machine Learning algorithms as applied in this paper, appear to possess the potential of performing optimally in a real-life situation of monitoring a COVID-19 patient. This paper is unique given its ability to predict the next probable location of a COVID-19 patient. In the review of extant literature, prediction of the next probable location of a COVID-19 patient was not in evidence using the same Machine Learning algorithms.

UIFDBC: Effective density based clustering to find clusters of arbitrary shapes without user input

Density-based clustering has the ability to detect arbitrary shaped clusters in any dataset. In recent years, several density peak clustering methods have been reported. Among these, a few need user input(s), but majority use cluster validity indices to provide the best results. In this paper, we propose a density-based user-input-free clustering method named UIFDBC, which is capable of detecting clusters of arbitrary shapes, without depending on any specific cluster validity index. The method is evaluated on 16 synthetic and 7 real-world datasets and compared with 8 recent density-based clustering methods. The results show our method is superior, in general, to its counterparts in terms of discovering arbitrary shaped clusters on tested datasets. The approach also has the ability to handle low-density instances in a special manner to minimize error propagation. Our method is available as an R package and can be downloaded by clicking the link https://sites.google.com/view/hussinchowdhury/software.

A Clustering-Based Coverage Path Planning Method for Autonomous Heterogeneous UAVs

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been widely applied in civilian and military applications due to their high autonomy and strong adaptability. Although UAVs can achieve effective cost reduction and flexibility enhancement in the development of large-scale systems, they result in a serious path planning and task allocation problem. Coverage path planning, which tries to seek flight paths to cover all of regions of interest, is one of the key technologies in achieving autonomous driving of UAVs and difficult to obtain optimal solutions because of its NP-Hard computational complexity. In this paper, we study the coverage path planning problem of autonomous heterogeneous UAVs on a bounded number of regions. First, with models of separated regions and heterogeneous UAVs, we propose an exact formulation based on mixed integer linear programming to fully search the solution space and produce optimal flight paths for autonomous UAVs. Then, inspired from density-based clustering methods, we design an original clustering-based algorithm to classify regions into clusters and obtain approximate optimal point-to-point paths for UAVs such that coverage tasks would be carried out correctly and efficiently. Experiments with randomly generated regions are conducted to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

A clustering and ensemble based classifier for data stream classification

In the era of data mining, the research industry has great attention to data stream mining as well as it has a great impact on a wide range of applications like networking, telecommunication, education, banking, weather forecasting, a stock market, and so on. Because of these data stream mining having more attention from researchers. The handling of concept drifting data streams is one of the major issues and challenges in the data stream mining field. In the presence of the concept drift, the performance of the learning algorithm always degrades. In this paper, a hybrid method has been proposed which are the combination of an ensemble, and grid and density-based clustering methods. The proposed method is tested on both synthetic as well as real data. The proposed method works well in the presence of concept drift and performance is measured in terms of time, accuracy, and memory. As compared with the state-of-art algorithms, the proposed method performed well and gave better accuracy using synthetic datasets like 88.29%, 71.34%, and 75.39% for Hyperplane, RBF, and LED respectively and for real datasets 86.17%, 86.28%, 95.15%, and 99.83% for Adult, Census-Income, KDDCup99%–10%, and Covertype respectively.

Density-based clustering of static and dynamic functional MRI connectivity features obtained from subjects with cognitive impairment

Various machine-learning classification techniques have been employed previously to classify brain states in healthy and disease populations using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). These methods generally use supervised classifiers that are sensitive to outliers and require labeling of training data to generate a predictive model. Density-based clustering, which overcomes these issues, is a popular unsupervised learning approach whose utility for high-dimensional neuroimaging data has not been previously evaluated. Its advantages include insensitivity to outliers and ability to work with unlabeled data. Unlike the popular k-means clustering, the number of clusters need not be specified. In this study, we compare the performance of two popular density-based clustering methods, DBSCAN and OPTICS, in accurately identifying individuals with three stages of cognitive impairment, including Alzheimer’s disease. We used static and dynamic functional connectivity features for clustering, which captures the strength and temporal variation of brain connectivity respectively. To assess the robustness of clustering to noise/outliers, we propose a novel method called recursive-clustering using additive-noise (R-CLAN). Results demonstrated that both clustering algorithms were effective, although OPTICS with dynamic connectivity features outperformed in terms of cluster purity (95.46%) and robustness to noise/outliers. This study demonstrates that density-based clustering can accurately and robustly identify diagnostic classes in an unsupervised way using brain connectivity.

Нові методи та рішення щодо побудови моделі поведінки користувачів

Наведено нові методи та рішення щодо побудови моделі поведінки користувачів, які дадуть змогу виявити закономірності планування зустрічей друзів на підставі аналізу їхнього щоденного руху. Для цього попередньо проаналізовано низку методів і алгоритмів кластеризації даних і виокремлено особливості їхнього застосування. З'ясовано, що основними перевагами методів кластеризації даних на підставі їхньої щільності є можливість виявлення кластерів вільної форми різного розміру та стійкості до шуму та викидів. Однак до недоліків цих методів можна віднести високу чутливість до встановлення вхідних параметрів, не чіткий опис класів і непридатність для кластеризації даних великих розмірів. З'ясовано, що основною проблемою всіх алгоритмів кластеризації є їх масштабованість із збільшенням обсягу оброблених даних. Встановлено, що основними проблемами більшості з них є складність налаштування оптимальних вхідних параметрів (для алгоритмів щільності, сітки чи моделі), ідентифікація кластерів різної форми та щільності (алгоритми розподілу, алгоритми на підставі сітки), нечіткі критерії завершення (ієрархічний, розділовий та на підставі моделі). Оскільки процедура кластеризації є тільки одним із етапів оброблення даних системи загалом, обраний алгоритм повинен бути простим у використанні та простим для налаштування вхідних параметрів. Дослідження показують, що ієрархічні методи кластеризації містять ряд алгоритмів, придатних як для оброблення даних невеликого обсягу, так і для аналізу великих даних, що є актуальним у галузі соціальних мереж. На підставі виконаного аналізу даних, зібрано інформацію для заповнення розумного профілю користувача. Значну увагу приділено дослідженню асоціативних правил, на підставі чого запропоновано алгоритм для вилучення асоціативних правил, що дало змогу знаходити статистично значущі правила, а також шукати тільки залежності, визначені загальним набором вхідних даних, та має високу обчислювальну складність, якщо існує багато правил класифікації. Розроблено підхід, що орієнтований на створення та розуміння моделей поведінки користувачів, прогнозування майбутньої поведінки за допомогою створеного шаблону. Досліджено методи моделювання попереднього оброблення даних (кластеризація) та виявлено закономірності планування зустрічей друзів на підставі аналізу щоденного руху людей та їхніх друзів. Наведено методи створення та розуміння моделей поведінки користувачів, застосовано алгоритм k-means для групування користувачів, що дало змогу визначити, наскільки добре кожен об'єкт знаходиться у своєму кластері. Введено поняття правил асоціації, розроблено метод пошуку залежностей, оцінено точність моделі.