Introduction to Density Based Clustering

In density-based clustering, clusters are defined as areas of higher density than the remainder of the data sets. Objects in more sparse areas are considered to be outliers or border points. This helps discover clusters of arbitrary shape.

DBSCAN

Given a set of points in space, it groups together points that are closely packed together while marking points that lie alone in low-density regions as outliers.

Preliminary Information

Non core points can be part of a cluster, but they form its "edge", since they cannot be used to reach more points.

Reachability is not a symmetric relation since, by definition, no point may be reachable from a non-core point, regardless of distance.

Two points $p$ and $q$ are density-connected if there is a point $o$ such that both $p$ and $q$ are reachable from $o$. Density-connectedness is symmetric.

A cluster then satisfies two properties:

  1. All points within the cluster are mutually density-connected
  2. If a point is density-reachable from any point of the cluster, it is part of the cluster as well.

Algorithm

  1. Find the $\epsilon$ neighbors of every point, and identify the core points with more than $k$ neighbors.
  2. Find the connected components of core points on the neighborhood graph, ignoring all non-core points.
  3. Assign each non-core point to a nearby cluster if the cluster is an $\epsilon$ (eps) neighbor, otherwise assign it to noise.

Advantages

Disadvantages

Rule of Thumbs for parameters

$k$: $k$ must be larger than $(D + 1)$ where $D$ is the number of dimensions in the dataset. Normally $k$ is chosen to be twice the number of dimensions.

$\epsilon$: Ideally the $k^{th}$ nearest neighbors are at roughly the same distance. Plot the sorted distance of every point to it's $k^{th}$ nearest neighbor

Example of Run Through

https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~jing/cse601/fa12/materials/clustering_density.pdf