Clustering Spatial Data when Facing Physical Constraints

  • Authors:
  • Osmar R. Zaïane;Chi-Hoon Lee

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • ICDM '02 Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Clustering spatial data is a well-known problem that hasbeen extensively studied to find hidden patterns or meaningfulsub-groups and has many applications such as satelliteimagery, geographic information systems, medical imageanalysis, etc. Although many methods have been proposedin the literature, very few have considered constraintssuch that physical obstacles and bridges linking clustersmay have significant consequences on the effectiveness ofthe clustering. Taking into account these constraints duringthe clustering process is costly, and the effective modeling ofthe constraints is of paramount importance for good performance.In this paper, we define the clustering problem in thepresence of constraints - obstacles and crossings - and investigateits efficiency and effectiveness for large databases.In addition, we introduce a new approach to model theseconstraints to prune the search space and reduce the numberof polygons to test during clustering. The algorithmDBCluC we present detects clusters of arbitrary shape andis insensitive to noise and the input order. Its average runningcomplexity is O(NlogN) where N is the number of dataobjects.