Efficient Online Stream Clustering Based on Fast Peeling of Boundary Micro-Cluster

A growing number of applications generate streaming data, making data stream mining a popular research topic. Classification-based streaming algorithms require pre-training on labeled data. Manually labeling a large number of samples in the data stream is impractical and cost-prohibitive. Stream clustering algorithms rely on unsupervised learning. They have been widely studied for their ability to effectively analyze high-speed data streams without prior knowledge. Stream clustering plays a key role in data stream mining. Currently, most data stream clustering algorithms adopt the online–offline framework. In the online stage, micro-clusters are maintained, and in the offline stage, they are clustered using an algorithm similar to density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN). When data streams have clusters with varying densities and ambiguous boundaries, traditional data stream clustering algorithms may be less effective. To overcome the above limitations, this article proposes a fully online stream clustering algorithm called fast boundary peeling stream clustering (FBPStream). First, FBPStream defines a decay-based kernel density estimation (KDE). It can discover clusters with varying densities and identify the evolving trend of streams well. Then, FBPStream implements an efficient boundary micro-cluster peeling technique to identify the potential core micro-clusters. Finally, FBPStream employs a parallel clustering strategy to effectively cluster core and boundary micro-clusters. The proposed algorithm is compared with ten popular algorithms on 15 data streams. Experimental results show that FBPStream is competitive with the other ten popular algorithms.