A Data Distribution View of Clustering Algorithms

Cluster analysis (Jain & Dubes, 1988) provides insight into the data by dividing the objects into groups (clusters), such that objects in a cluster are more similar to each other than objects in other clusters. Cluster analysis has long played an important role in a wide variety of fields, such as psychology, bioinformatics, pattern recognition, information retrieval, machine learning, and data mining. Many clustering algorithms, such as K-means and Unweighted Pair Group Method with Arithmetic Mean (UPGMA), have been wellestablished. A recent research focus on clustering analysis is to understand the strength and weakness of various clustering algorithms with respect to data factors. Indeed, people have identified some data characteristics that may strongly affect clustering analysis including high dimensionality and sparseness, the large size, noise, types of attributes and data sets, and scales of attributes (Tan, Steinbach, & Kumar, 2005). However, further investigation is expected to reveal whether and how the data distributions can have the impact on the performance of clustering algorithms. Along this line, we study clustering algorithms by answering three questions: