A Clustering-Oriented Closeness Measure Based on Neighborhood Chain and Its Application in the Clustering Ensemble Framework Based on the Fusion of Different Closeness Measures

Closeness measures are crucial to clustering methods. In most traditional clustering methods, the closeness between data points or clusters is measured by the geometric distance alone. These metrics quantify the closeness only based on the concerned data points' positions in the feature space, and they might cause problems when dealing with clustering tasks having arbitrary clusters shapes and different clusters densities. In this paper, we first propose a novel Closeness Measure between data points based on the Neighborhood Chain (CMNC). Instead of using geometric distances alone, CMNC measures the closeness between data points by quantifying the difficulty for one data point to reach another through a chain of neighbors. Furthermore, based on CMNC, we also propose a clustering ensemble framework that combines CMNC and geometric-distance-based closeness measures together in order to utilize both of their advantages. In this framework, the "bad data points" that are hard to cluster correctly are identified; then different closeness measures are applied to different types of data points to get the unified clustering results. With the fusion of different closeness measures, the framework can get not only better clustering results in complicated clustering tasks, but also higher efficiency.