FLAME clustering

Last updated

Fuzzy clustering by Local Approximation of MEmberships (FLAME) is a data clustering algorithm that defines clusters in the dense parts of a dataset and performs cluster assignment solely based on the neighborhood relationships among objects. The key feature of this algorithm is that the neighborhood relationships among neighboring objects in the feature space are used to constrain the memberships of neighboring objects in the fuzzy membership space.

Contents

Description of the FLAME algorithm

The FLAME algorithm is mainly divided into three steps:

  1. Extraction of the structure information from the dataset:
    1. Construct a neighborhood graph to connect each object to its K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN);
    2. Estimate a density for each object based on its proximities to its KNN;
    3. Objects are classified into 3 types:
      1. Cluster Supporting Object (CSO): object with density higher than all its neighbors;
      2. Cluster Outliers: object with density lower than all its neighbors, and lower than a predefined threshold;
      3. the rest.
  2. Local/Neighborhood approximation of fuzzy memberships:
    1. Initialization of fuzzy membership:
      1. Each CSO is assigned with fixed and full membership to itself to represent one cluster;
      2. All outliers are assigned with fixed and full membership to the outlier group;
      3. The rest are assigned with equal memberships to all clusters and the outlier group;
    2. Then the fuzzy memberships of all type 3 objects are updated by a converging iterative procedure called Local/Neighborhood Approximation of Fuzzy Memberships, in which the fuzzy membership of each object is updated by a linear combination of the fuzzy memberships of its nearest neighbors.
  3. Cluster construction from fuzzy memberships in two possible ways:
    1. One-to-one object-cluster assignment, to assign each object to the cluster in which it has the highest membership;
    2. One-to-multiple object-clusters assignment, to assign each object to the cluster in which it has a membership higher than a threshold.

The optimization problem in FLAME

The Local/Neighborhood Approximation of Fuzzy Memberships is a procedure to minimize the Local/Neighborhood Approximation Error (LAE/NAE) defined as the following:

where is the set of all type 3 objects, is the fuzzy membership vector of object , is the set of nearest neighbors of , and with are the coefficients reflecting the relative proximities of the nearest neighbors.

The NAE can be minimized by solving the following linear equations with unique solution which is the unique global minimum of NAE with value zero:

where is the number of CSOs plus one (for the outlier group). The following iterative procedure can be used to solve these linear equations:

A simple illustration on a 2-Dimension testing dataset

FLAME Demo.png

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multivariate normal distribution</span> Generalization of the one-dimensional normal distribution to higher dimensions

In probability theory and statistics, the multivariate normal distribution, multivariate Gaussian distribution, or joint normal distribution is a generalization of the one-dimensional (univariate) normal distribution to higher dimensions. One definition is that a random vector is said to be k-variate normally distributed if every linear combination of its k components has a univariate normal distribution. Its importance derives mainly from the multivariate central limit theorem. The multivariate normal distribution is often used to describe, at least approximately, any set of (possibly) correlated real-valued random variables each of which clusters around a mean value.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Taylor's theorem</span> Approximation of a function by a truncated power series

In calculus, Taylor's theorem gives an approximation of a -times differentiable function around a given point by a polynomial of degree , called the -th-order Taylor polynomial. For a smooth function, the Taylor polynomial is the truncation at the order of the Taylor series of the function. The first-order Taylor polynomial is the linear approximation of the function, and the second-order Taylor polynomial is often referred to as the quadratic approximation. There are several versions of Taylor's theorem, some giving explicit estimates of the approximation error of the function by its Taylor polynomial.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pattern recognition</span> Automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data

Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess (PR) capabilities but their primary function is to distinguish and create emergent pattern. PR has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphics and machine learning. Pattern recognition has its origins in statistics and engineering; some modern approaches to pattern recognition include the use of machine learning, due to the increased availability of big data and a new abundance of processing power.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mutual information</span> Measure of dependence between two variables

In probability theory and information theory, the mutual information (MI) of two random variables is a measure of the mutual dependence between the two variables. More specifically, it quantifies the "amount of information" obtained about one random variable by observing the other random variable. The concept of mutual information is intimately linked to that of entropy of a random variable, a fundamental notion in information theory that quantifies the expected "amount of information" held in a random variable.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hierarchical clustering</span> Statistical method of analysis which seeks to build a hierarchy of clusters

In data mining and statistics, hierarchical clustering is a method of cluster analysis that seeks to build a hierarchy of clusters. Strategies for hierarchical clustering generally fall into two categories:

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cluster analysis</span> Grouping a set of objects by similarity

Cluster analysis or clustering is the task of grouping a set of objects in such a way that objects in the same group are more similar to each other than to those in other groups (clusters). It is a main task of exploratory data analysis, and a common technique for statistical data analysis, used in many fields, including pattern recognition, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphics and machine learning.

In statistics, a mixture model is a probabilistic model for representing the presence of subpopulations within an overall population, without requiring that an observed data set should identify the sub-population to which an individual observation belongs. Formally a mixture model corresponds to the mixture distribution that represents the probability distribution of observations in the overall population. However, while problems associated with "mixture distributions" relate to deriving the properties of the overall population from those of the sub-populations, "mixture models" are used to make statistical inferences about the properties of the sub-populations given only observations on the pooled population, without sub-population identity information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Total least squares</span>

In applied statistics, total least squares is a type of errors-in-variables regression, a least squares data modeling technique in which observational errors on both dependent and independent variables are taken into account. It is a generalization of Deming regression and also of orthogonal regression, and can be applied to both linear and non-linear models.

The scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) is a computer vision algorithm to detect, describe, and match local features in images, invented by David Lowe in 1999. Applications include object recognition, robotic mapping and navigation, image stitching, 3D modeling, gesture recognition, video tracking, individual identification of wildlife and match moving.

In statistics, ordinary least squares (OLS) is a type of linear least squares method for choosing the unknown parameters in a linear regression model by the principle of least squares: minimizing the sum of the squares of the differences between the observed dependent variable in the input dataset and the output of the (linear) function of the independent variable.

In statistics, the k-nearest neighbors algorithm (k-NN) is a non-parametric supervised learning method first developed by Evelyn Fix and Joseph Hodges in 1951, and later expanded by Thomas Cover. It is used for classification and regression. In both cases, the input consists of the k closest training examples in a data set. The output depends on whether k-NN is used for classification or regression:

<i>k</i>-means clustering Vector quantization algorithm minimizing the sum of squared deviations

k-means clustering is a method of vector quantization, originally from signal processing, that aims to partition n observations into k clusters in which each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean, serving as a prototype of the cluster. This results in a partitioning of the data space into Voronoi cells. k-means clustering minimizes within-cluster variances, but not regular Euclidean distances, which would be the more difficult Weber problem: the mean optimizes squared errors, whereas only the geometric median minimizes Euclidean distances. For instance, better Euclidean solutions can be found using k-medians and k-medoids.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fuzzy clustering</span>

Fuzzy clustering is a form of clustering in which each data point can belong to more than one cluster.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conditional random field</span> Class of statistical modeling methods

Conditional random fields (CRFs) are a class of statistical modeling methods often applied in pattern recognition and machine learning and used for structured prediction. Whereas a classifier predicts a label for a single sample without considering "neighbouring" samples, a CRF can take context into account. To do so, the predictions are modelled as a graphical model, which represents the presence of dependencies between the predictions. What kind of graph is used depends on the application. For example, in natural language processing, "linear chain" CRFs are popular, for which each prediction is dependent only on its immediate neighbours. In image processing, the graph typically connects locations to nearby and/or similar locations to enforce that they receive similar predictions.

In computer science, locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) is an algorithmic technique that hashes similar input items into the same "buckets" with high probability. Since similar items end up in the same buckets, this technique can be used for data clustering and nearest neighbor search. It differs from conventional hashing techniques in that hash collisions are maximized, not minimized. Alternatively, the technique can be seen as a way to reduce the dimensionality of high-dimensional data; high-dimensional input items can be reduced to low-dimensional versions while preserving relative distances between items.

Stein's method is a general method in probability theory to obtain bounds on the distance between two probability distributions with respect to a probability metric. It was introduced by Charles Stein, who first published it in 1972, to obtain a bound between the distribution of a sum of -dependent sequence of random variables and a standard normal distribution in the Kolmogorov (uniform) metric and hence to prove not only a central limit theorem, but also bounds on the rates of convergence for the given metric.

In mathematics, the method of steepest descent or saddle-point method is an extension of Laplace's method for approximating an integral, where one deforms a contour integral in the complex plane to pass near a stationary point, in roughly the direction of steepest descent or stationary phase. The saddle-point approximation is used with integrals in the complex plane, whereas Laplace’s method is used with real integrals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Logit-normal distribution</span>

In probability theory, a logit-normal distribution is a probability distribution of a random variable whose logit has a normal distribution. If Y is a random variable with a normal distribution, and t is the standard logistic function, then X = t(Y) has a logit-normal distribution; likewise, if X is logit-normally distributed, then Y = logit(X)= log (X/(1-X)) is normally distributed. It is also known as the logistic normal distribution, which often refers to a multinomial logit version (e.g.).

t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding Technique for dimensionality reduction

t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) is a statistical method for visualizing high-dimensional data by giving each datapoint a location in a two or three-dimensional map. It is based on Stochastic Neighbor Embedding originally developed by Sam Roweis and Geoffrey Hinton, where Laurens van der Maaten proposed the t-distributed variant. It is a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique for embedding high-dimensional data for visualization in a low-dimensional space of two or three dimensions. Specifically, it models each high-dimensional object by a two- or three-dimensional point in such a way that similar objects are modeled by nearby points and dissimilar objects are modeled by distant points with high probability.

In machine learning, the kernel embedding of distributions comprises a class of nonparametric methods in which a probability distribution is represented as an element of a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS). A generalization of the individual data-point feature mapping done in classical kernel methods, the embedding of distributions into infinite-dimensional feature spaces can preserve all of the statistical features of arbitrary distributions, while allowing one to compare and manipulate distributions using Hilbert space operations such as inner products, distances, projections, linear transformations, and spectral analysis. This learning framework is very general and can be applied to distributions over any space on which a sensible kernel function may be defined. For example, various kernels have been proposed for learning from data which are: vectors in , discrete classes/categories, strings, graphs/networks, images, time series, manifolds, dynamical systems, and other structured objects. The theory behind kernel embeddings of distributions has been primarily developed by Alex Smola, Le Song , Arthur Gretton, and Bernhard Schölkopf. A review of recent works on kernel embedding of distributions can be found in.