A Distributed and Approximated Nearest Neighbors Algorithm for an Efficient Large Scale Mean Shift Clustering

In this paper we target the class of modal clustering methods where clusters are defined in terms of the local modes of the probability density function which generates the data. The most well-known modal clustering method is the k-means clustering. Mean Shift clustering is a generalization of the k-means clustering which computes arbitrarily shaped clusters as defined as the basins of attraction to the local modes created by the density gradient ascent paths. Despite its potential, the Mean Shift approach is a computationally expensive method for unsupervised learning. Thus, we introduce two contributions aiming to provide clustering algorithms with a linear time complexity, as opposed to the quadratic time complexity for the exact Mean Shift clustering. Firstly we propose a scalable procedure to approximate the density gradient ascent. Second, our proposed scalable cluster labeling technique is presented. Both propositions are based on Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to approximate nearest neighbors. These two techniques may be used for moderate sized datasets. Furthermore, we show that using our proposed approximations of the density gradient ascent as a pre-processing step in other clustering methods can also improve dedicated classification metrics. For the latter, a distributed implementation, written for the Spark/Scala ecosystem is proposed. For all these considered clustering methods, we present experimental results illustrating their labeling accuracy and their potential to solve concrete problems.Comment: Algorithms are available at https://github.com/Clustering4Ever/Clustering4Eve

Hybrid Cloud-Based Privacy Preserving Clustering as Service for Enterprise Big Data

Clustering as service is being offered by many cloud service providers. It helps enterprises to learn hidden patterns and learn knowledge from large, big data generated by enterprises. Though it brings lot of value to enterprises, it also exposes the data to various security and privacy threats. Privacy preserving clustering is being proposed a solution to address this problem. But the privacy preserving clustering as outsourced service model involves too much overhead on querying user, lacks adaptivity to incremental data and involves frequent interaction between service provider and the querying user. There is also a lack of personalization to clustering by the querying user. This work “Locality Sensitive Hashing for Transformed Dataset (LSHTD)” proposes a hybrid cloud-based clustering as service model for streaming data that address the problems in the existing model such as privacy preserving k-means clustering outsourcing under multiple keys (PPCOM) and secure nearest neighbor clustering (SNNC) models, The solution combines hybrid cloud, LSHTD clustering algorithm as outsourced service model. Through experiments, the proposed solution is able is found to reduce the computation cost by 23% and communication cost by 6% and able to provide better clustering accuracy with ARI greater than 4.59% compared to existing works

Massively-Parallel Heat Map Sorting and Applications To Explainable Clustering

Given a set of points labeled with $k$ labels, we introduce the heat map sorting problem as reordering and merging the points and dimensions while preserving the clusters (labels). A cluster is preserved if it remains connected, i.e., if it is not split into several clusters and no two clusters are merged. We prove the problem is NP-hard and we give a fixed-parameter algorithm with a constant number of rounds in the massively parallel computation model, where each machine has a sublinear memory and the total memory of the machines is linear. We give an approximation algorithm for a NP-hard special case of the problem. We empirically compare our algorithm with k-means and density-based clustering (DBSCAN) using a dimensionality reduction via locality-sensitive hashing on several directed and undirected graphs of email and computer networks

A Comparison of Blocking Methods for Record Linkage

Record linkage seeks to merge databases and to remove duplicates when unique identifiers are not available. Most approaches use blocking techniques to reduce the computational complexity associated with record linkage. We review traditional blocking techniques, which typically partition the records according to a set of field attributes, and consider two variants of a method known as locality sensitive hashing, sometimes referred to as "private blocking." We compare these approaches in terms of their recall, reduction ratio, and computational complexity. We evaluate these methods using different synthetic datafiles and conclude with a discussion of privacy-related issues.Comment: 22 pages, 2 tables, 7 figure