Automatic Clustering via Outward Statistical Testing on Density Metrics

Clustering is one of the research hotspots in the field of data mining and has extensive applications in practice. Recently, Rodriguez and Laio [1] published a clustering algorithm on Science that identifies the clustering centers in an intuitive way and clusters objects efficiently and effectively. However, the algorithm is sensitive to a preassigned parameter and suffers from the identification of the “ideal” number of clusters. To overcome these shortages, this paper proposes a new clustering algorithm that can detect the clustering centers automatically via statistical testing. Specifically, the proposed algorithm first defines a new metric to measure the density of an object that is more robust to the preassigned parameter, further generates a metric to evaluate the centrality of each object. Afterwards, it identifies the objects with extremely large centrality metrics as the clustering centers via an outward statistical testing method. Finally, it groups the remaining objects into clusters containing their nearest neighbors with higher density. Extensive experiments are conducted over different kinds of clustering data sets to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and compare with the algorithm in Science. The results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithm.