HDBSCAN*, a state-of-the-art density-based hierarchical clustering method,
produces a hierarchical organization of clusters in a dataset w.r.t. a
parameter mpts. While the performance of HDBSCAN* is robust w.r.t. mpts in the
sense that a small change in mpts typically leads to only a small or no change
in the clustering structure, choosing a "good" mpts value can be challenging:
depending on the data distribution, a high or low value for mpts may be more
appropriate, and certain data clusters may reveal themselves at different
values of mpts. To explore results for a range of mpts values, however, one has
to run HDBSCAN* for each value in the range independently, which is
computationally inefficient. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach to
compute all HDBSCAN* hierarchies for a range of mpts values by replacing the
graph used by HDBSCAN* with a much smaller graph that is guaranteed to contain
the required information. An extensive experimental evaluation shows that with
our approach one can obtain over one hundred hierarchies for the computational
cost equivalent to running HDBSCAN* about 2 times.Comment: A short version of this paper appears at IEEE ICDM 2017. Corrected
typos. Revised abstrac
