Common clustering algorithms require multiple scans of all the data to
achieve convergence, and this is prohibitive when large databases, with data
arriving in streams, must be processed. Some algorithms to extend the popular
K-means method to the analysis of streaming data are present in literature
since 1998 (Bradley et al. in Scaling clustering algorithms to large databases.
In: KDD. p. 9-15, 1998; O'Callaghan et al. in Streaming-data algorithms for
high-quality clustering. In: Proceedings of IEEE international conference on
data engineering. p. 685, 2001), based on the memorization and recursive update
of a small number of summary statistics, but they either don't take into
account the specific variability of the clusters, or assume that the random
vectors which are processed and grouped have uncorrelated components.
Unfortunately this is not the case in many practical situations. We here
propose a new algorithm to process data streams, with data having correlated
components and coming from clusters with different covariance matrices. Such
covariance matrices are estimated via an optimal double shrinkage method, which
provides positive definite estimates even in presence of a few data points, or
of data having components with small variance. This is needed to invert the
matrices and compute the Mahalanobis distances that we use for the data
assignment to the clusters. We also estimate the total number of clusters from
the data.Comment: title changed, rewritte
