Clustering by defining and merging candidates of cluster centers via independence and affinity

Clustering analysis is to classify elements into categories based on their similarity. Clustering by fast search and find of density peaks (CFSFDP) has been proven to be an effective and novel algorithm, which identifies the centers of clusters with density maxima. However, the performance of CFSFDP is quite sensitive to the estimation of densities, that is exactly the selection of the cutoff distance (d_c). In a conventional way, the selection of d_c is based on subjective experience. It meets difficulties in finding an appropriate d_c, especially for detecting nonspherical clusters, because CFSFDP cannot perform well when there are more than one density peak for one cluster. Besides, another barrier of applying CFSFDP is that manual interaction is always required for making an effective selection of cluster centers. In this paper, a new density-based clustering algorithm, clustering by defining and merging candidates of cluster centers via independence and affinity (CDMC-IA), is proposed. With its strategy, an appropriate value of cutoff distance d_c can be well suggested and the robustness of the method itself is enhanced. Moreover, CDMC-IA introduces a new quantity independence to sort and select cluster centers, instead of human based selection from decision graph. Another quantity affinity is also introduced, which well handles multiple density peaks existing in one cluster and is able to assign each data point to the its targeted cluster. The performance of applying conventional clustering methods to benchmark datasets will be compared with the proposed method in this paper.