clarans

Clustering Large Applications based upon RANdomized Search. CLARANS is an efficient medoid-based clustering algorithm. The k-medoids algorithm is an adaptation of the k-means algorithm. Rather than calculate the mean of the items in each cluster, a representative item, or medoid, is chosen for each cluster at each iteration. In CLARANS, the process of finding k medoids from n objects is viewed abstractly as searching through a certain graph. In the graph, a node is represented by a set of k objects as selected medoids. Two nodes are neighbors if their sets differ by only one object. In each iteration, CLARANS considers a set of randomly chosen neighbor nodes as candidate of new medoids. We will move to the neighbor node if the neighbor is a better choice for medoids. Otherwise, a local optima is discovered. The entire process is repeated multiple time to find better.

CLARANS has two parameters: the maximum number of neighbors examined (maxNeighbor) and the number of local minima obtained (numLocal). The higher the value of maxNeighbor, the closer is CLARANS to PAM, and the longer is each search of a local minima. But the quality of such a local minima is higher and fewer local minima needs to be obtained.

====References:====

• R. Ng and J. Han. CLARANS: A Method for Clustering Objects for Spatial Data Mining. IEEE TRANS. KNOWLEDGE AND DATA ENGINEERING, 2002.

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