1. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 1 Clustering and Object Similarity Evaluation ©Jiawei Han and Micheline Kamber with Additions and Modifications by Ch. Eick Organization for COSC 6340: 1. What is Clustering? 2. Object Similarity Measurement 3. K-Means Clustering Algorithm 4. Hierarchical Clustering

2. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 2 What is Cluster Analysis? Cluster: a collection of data objects Cluster analysis: Grouping a set of data objects into clusters such that the data objects are similar to one another within the same cluster dissimilar to the objects in other clusters The quality of a clustering result depends on both the similarity measure used and on the clustering method employed. Clustering is unsupervised classification: no predefined classes and no training examples

3. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 3 Examples of Clustering Applications Marketing: Help marketers discover distinct groups in their customer bases, and then use this knowledge to develop targeted marketing programs Land use: Identification of areas of similar land use in an earth observation database Insurance: Identifying groups of motor insurance policy holders with a high average claim cost City-planning: Identifying groups of houses according to their house type, value, and geographical location Earth-quake studies: Observed earth quake epicenters should be clustered along continent faults

4. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 4 Requirements of Clustering in Data Mining Scalability Ability to deal with different types of attributes Discovery of clusters with arbitrary shape Minimal requirements for domain knowledge to determine input parameters Able to deal with noise and outliers Insensitive to order of input records High dimensionality Incorporation of user-specified constraints Interpretability and usability

5. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 5 Data Structures for Clustering Data matrix (n objects, p attributes) (Dis)Similarity matrix (nxn)

6. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 6 Quality Evaluation of Clusters Dissimilarity/Similarity metric: Similarity is expressed in terms of a normalized distance function d, which is typically metric; typically:  (o i, o j ) = 1 - d (o i, o j ) There is a separate “quality” function that measures the “goodness” of a cluster. The definitions of similarity functions are usually very different for interval-scaled, boolean, categorical, ordinal and ratio variables. Weights should be associated with different variables based on applications and data semantics. It is hard to define “similar enough” or “good enough” the answer is typically highly subjective.

7. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 7 Challenges in Obtaining Object Similarity Measures Many Types of Variables Interval-scaled variables Binary variables and nominal variables Ordinal variables Ratio-scaled variables Objects are characterized by variables belonging to different types (mixture of variables)

8. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 8 Case Study: Patient Similarity The following relation is given (with 10000 tuples): Patient(ssn, weight, height, cancer-sev, eye-color, age) Attribute Domains ssn: 9 digits weight between 30 and 650; m weight =158 s weight =24.20 height between 0.30 and 2.20 in meters; m height =1.52 s height =19.2 cancer-sev: 4=serious 3=quite_serious 2=medium 1=minor eye-color: {brown, blue, green, grey } age: between 3 and 100; m age =45 s age =13.2 Task: Define Patient Similarity

9. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 9 Generating a Global Similarity Measure from Single Variable Similarity Measures Assumption: A database may contain up to six types of variables: symmetric binary, asymmetric binary, nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio. 1. Standardize variable and associate similarity measure  i with the standardized i-th variable and determine weight w i of the i-th variable. 2. Create the following global (dis)similarity measure  :

10. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 10 A Methodology to Obtain a Similarity Matrix 1. Understand Variables 2. Remove (non-relevant and redundant) Variables 3. (Standardize and) Normalize Variables (typically using z- scores or variable values are transformed to numbers in [0,1]) 4. Associate (Dis)Similarity Measure d f /  f with each Variable 5. Associate a Weight (measuring its importance) with each Variable 6. Compute the (Dis)Similarity Matrix 7. Apply Similarity-based Data Mining Technique (e.g. Clustering, Nearest Neighbor, Multi-dimensional Scaling,…)

11. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 11 Interval-scaled Variables Standardize data using z-scores Calculate the mean absolute deviation: where Calculate the standardized measurement (z-score) Using mean absolute deviation is more robust than using standard deviation

12. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 12 Normalization in [0,1] Problem: If non-normalized variables are used the maximum distance between two values can be greater than 1. Solution: Normalize interval-scaled variables using where min f denotes the minimum value and max f denotes the maximum value of the f-th attribute in the data set and  is constant that is choses depending on the similarity measure (e.g. if Manhattan distance is used  is chosen to be 1).

13. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 13 Other Normalizations Goal:Limit the maximum distance to 1 Start using a distance measure d f (x,y) Determine the maximum distance dmax f that can occur for two values of the f-th attribute (e.g. dmax f =max f -min f ). Define  f (x,y)=1- (d f (x,y)/ dmax f ) Advantage: Negative similarities cannot occur.

14. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 14 Similarity Between Objects Distances are normally used to measure the similarity or dissimilarity between two data objects Some popular ones include: Minkowski distance: where i = (x i1, x i2, …, x ip ) and j = (x j1, x j2, …, x jp ) are two p-dimensional data objects, and q is a positive integer If q = 1, d is Manhattan distance

15. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 15 Similarity Between Objects (Cont.) If q = 2, d is Euclidean distance: Properties d(i,j)  0 d(i,i) = 0 d(i,j) = d(j,i) d(i,j)  d(i,k) + d(k,j) Also one can use weighted distance, parametric Pearson product moment correlation, or other disimilarity measures.

16. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 16 Similarity with respect to a Set of Binary Variables A contingency table for binary data Object i Object j Ignores agree- ments in O’s Considers agree- ments in 0’s and 1’s to be equivalent.

17. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 17 Similarity between Binary Variable Sets Example gender is a symmetric attribute the remaining attributes are asymmetric binary let the values Y and P be set to 1, and the value N be set to 0

18. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 18 Nominal Variables A generalization of the binary variable in that it can take more than 2 states, e.g., red, yellow, blue, green Method 1: Simple matching m: # of matches, p: total # of variables Method 2: use a large number of binary variables creating a new binary variable for each of the M nominal states

19. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 19 Ordinal Variables An ordinal variable can be discrete or continuous order is important (e.g. UH-grade, hotel-rating) Can be treated like interval-scaled replacing x if by their rank: map the range of each variable onto [0, 1] by replacing the f-th variable of i-th object by compute the dissimilarity using methods for interval- scaled variables

20. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 20 Ratio-Scaled Variables Ratio-scaled variable: a positive measurement on a nonlinear scale, approximately at exponential scale, such as Ae Bt or Ae -Bt Methods: treat them like interval-scaled variables — not a good choice! (why?) apply logarithmic transformation y if = log(x if ) treat them as continuous ordinal data treat their rank as interval-scaled.

21. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 21 Case Study --- Normalization Patient(ssn, weight, height, cancer-sev, eye-color, age) Attribute Relevance: ssn no; eye-color minor; other major Attribute Normalization: ssn remove! weight between 30 and 650; m weight =158 s weight =24.20; transform to z weight = (x weight -158)/24.20 (alternatively, z weight =(x weight -30)/620)); height normalize like weight! cancer_sev: 4=serious 3=quite_serious 2=medium 1=minor; transform 4 to 1, 3 to 2/3, 2 to 1/3, 1 to 0 and then normalize like weight! age: normalize like weight!

22. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 22 Case Study --- Weight Selection and Similarity Measure Selection Patient(ssn, weight, height, cancer-sev, eye-color, age) For normalized weight, height, cancer_sev, age values use Manhattan distance function; e.g.:  weight (w1,w2)= 1  | ((w1-158)/24.20 )  ((w2-158)/24.20) | For eye-color use:  eye-color (c1,c2)= if c1=c2 then 1 else 0 Weight Assignment: 0.2 for eye-color; 1 for all others Final Solution --- chosen Similarity Measure  : Let o1=(s1,w1,h1,cs1,e1,a1) and o2=(s2,w2,h2,cs2,e2,a2)  (o1,o2):= (  weight (w1,w2) +  height (h1,h2) +  cancer- sev (cs1,cs2) +  age (a1,a2) + 0.2*  eye-color (e1,e2) ) /4.2

23. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 23 Major Clustering Approaches Partitioning algorithms: Construct various partitions and then evaluate them by some criterion Hierarchy algorithms: Create a hierarchical decomposition of the set of data (or objects) using some criterion Density-based: based on connectivity and density functions Grid-based: based on a multiple-level granularity structure Model-based: A model is hypothesized for each of the clusters and the idea is to find the best fit of that model to each other

24. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 24 Partitioning Algorithms: Basic Concept Partitioning method: Construct a partition of a database D of n objects into a set of k clusters Given a k, find a partition of k clusters that optimizes the chosen partitioning criterion Global optimal: exhaustively enumerate all partitions Heuristic methods: k-means and k-medoids algorithms k-means (MacQueen’67): Each cluster is represented by the center of the cluster k-medoids or PAM (Partition around medoids) (Kaufman & Rousseeuw’87): Each cluster is represented by one of the objects in the cluster

25. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 25 The K-Means Clustering Method Given k, the k-means algorithm is implemented in 4 steps: Partition objects into k nonempty subsets Compute seed points as the centroids of the clusters of the current partition. The centroid is the center (mean point) of the cluster. Assign each object to the cluster with the nearest seed point. Go back to Step 2, stop when no more new assignment.

26. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 26 The K-Means Clustering Method Example

27. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 27 Comments on the K-Means Method Strength Relatively efficient: O(tkn), where n is # objects, k is # clusters, and t is # iterations. Normally, k, t << n. Often terminates at a local optimum. The global optimum may be found using techniques such as: deterministic annealing and genetic algorithms Weakness Applicable only when mean is defined, then what about categorical data? Need to specify k, the number of clusters, in advance Unable to handle noisy data and outliers Not suitable to discover clusters with non-convex shapes

28. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 28 Hierarchical Clustering Use distance matrix as clustering criteria. This method does not require the number of clusters k as an input, but needs a termination condition Step 0 Step 1Step 2Step 3Step 4 b d c e a a b d e c d e a b c d e Step 4 Step 3Step 2Step 1Step 0 agglomerative (AGNES) divisive (DIANA)

29. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 29 A Dendrogram Shows How the Clusters are Merged Hierarchically Decompose data objects into a several levels of nested partitioning (tree of clusters), called a dendrogram. A clustering of the data objects is obtained by cutting the dendrogram at the desired level, then each connected component forms a cluster.

30. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 30 Data Extraction Tool DBMS Clustering Tool User Interface A set of clusters Similarity measure Similarity Measure Tool Default choices and domain information Library of similarity measures Type and weight information Object View Library of clustering algorithms CAL-FU/UH Database Clustering Similarity Assessment Environments Learning Tool Training Date

31. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 31 Prototypes of Similarity Assessment Tools Prototype1 (CAL State Fullerton): Supported the interactive definition of similarity measures; knowledge representation format does not rely on modular units; provides a nearest neighbor clustering algorithm for database clustering; functions were supported outside a DBMS Prototype 2 (UH): Similarity measures are defined using a special language (not interactively); tool supports modular units and functions are provided using a Java/SQL-Server 2000 framework; functions were partially moved inside a DBMS (although some are still inside Java); analysis results are stored in the database and therefore available for further analysis. Prototype 3 (UH): Supports the learning of similarity measures, functions are provided inside the DBMS, other capabilities???

32. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 32 Self-organizing feature maps (SOMs) SOM employ neural network techniques for clustering Clustering is also performed by having several units competing for the current object The unit whose weight vector is closest to the current object wins The winner and its neighbors learn by having their weights adjusted SOMs are believed to resemble processing that can occur in the brain Useful for visualizing high-dimensional data in 2- or 3-D space

33. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 33 Problems and Challenges Considerable progress has been made in scalable clustering methods Partitioning: k-means, k-medoids, CLARANS Hierarchical: BIRCH, CURE Density-based: DBSCAN, CLIQUE, OPTICS Grid-based: STING, WaveCluster Model-based: Autoclass, Denclue, Cobweb Current clustering techniques do not address all the requirements adequately Constraint-based clustering analysis: Constraints exist in data space (bridges and highways) or in user queries

34. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 34 Summary Object Similarity & Clustering Cluster analysis groups objects based on their similarity and has wide applications Appropriate similarity measures have to be chosen for various types of variables and combined into a global similarity measure. Clustering algorithms can be categorized into partitioning methods, hierarchical methods, density-based methods, grid-based methods, and model-based methods Methods to measure, compute, and learn object similarity are quite important, not only for clustering, but also for nearest neighbor approaches, information retrieval in general, and for data visualization.

35. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 35 References (1) R. Agrawal, J. Gehrke, D. Gunopulos, and P. Raghavan. Automatic subspace clustering of high dimensional data for data mining applications. SIGMOD'98 M. R. Anderberg. Cluster Analysis for Applications. Academic Press, 1973. M. Ankerst, M. Breunig, H.-P. Kriegel, and J. Sander. Optics: Ordering points to identify the clustering structure, SIGMOD’99. P. Arabie, L. J. Hubert, and G. De Soete. Clustering and Classification. World Scietific, 1996 M. Ester, H.-P. Kriegel, J. Sander, and X. Xu. A density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial databases. KDD'96. M. Ester, H.-P. Kriegel, and X. Xu. Knowledge discovery in large spatial databases: Focusing techniques for efficient class identification. SSD'95. D. Fisher. Knowledge acquisition via incremental conceptual clustering. Machine Learning, 2:139-172, 1987. D. Gibson, J. Kleinberg, and P. Raghavan. Clustering categorical data: An approach based on dynamic systems. In Proc. VLDB’98. S. Guha, R. Rastogi, and K. Shim. Cure: An efficient clustering algorithm for large databases. SIGMOD'98. A. K. Jain and R. C. Dubes. Algorithms for Clustering Data. Printice Hall, 1988.

36. Han, Kamber, Eick: Object Similarity & Clustering 36 References (2) L. Kaufman and P. J. Rousseeuw. Finding Groups in Data: an Introduction to Cluster Analysis. John Wiley & Sons, 1990. E. Knorr and R. Ng. Algorithms for mining distance-based outliers in large datasets. VLDB’98. G. J. McLachlan and K.E. Bkasford. Mixture Models: Inference and Applications to Clustering. John Wiley and Sons, 1988. P. Michaud. Clustering techniques. Future Generation Computer systems, 13, 1997. R. Ng and J. Han. Efficient and effective clustering method for spatial data mining. VLDB'94. E. Schikuta. Grid clustering: An efficient hierarchical clustering method for very large data sets. Proc. 1996 Int. Conf. on Pattern Recognition, 101-105. G. Sheikholeslami, S. Chatterjee, and A. Zhang. WaveCluster: A multi-resolution clustering approach for very large spatial databases. VLDB’98. W. Wang, Yang, R. Muntz, STING: A Statistical Information grid Approach to Spatial Data Mining, VLDB’97. T. Zhang, R. Ramakrishnan, and M. Livny. BIRCH : an efficient data clustering method for very large databases. SIGMOD'96.