A density-based algorithm for discovering clusters in large spatial Databases with Noise

Abstract

Clustering algorithms are attractive for the task of class iden-tification in spatial databases. However, the application to large spatial databases rises the following requirements for clustering algorithms: minimal requirements of domain knowledge to determine the input parameters, discovery of clusters with arbitrary shape and good efficiency on large da-tabases. The well-known clustering algorithms offer no solu-tion to the combination of these requirements. In this paper, we present the new clustering algorithm DBSCAN relying on a density-based notion of clusters which is designed to dis-cover clusters of arbitrary shape. DBSCAN requires only one input parameter and supports the user in determining an ap-propriate value for it. We performed an experimental evalua-tion of the effectiveness and efficiency of DBSCAN using synthetic data and real data of the SEQUOIA 2000 bench-mark. The results of our experiments demonstrate that (1) DBSCAN is significantly more effective in discovering clus-ters of arbitrary shape than the well-known algorithm CLAR-ANS, and that (2) DBSCAN outperforms CLARANS by factor of more than 100 in terms of efficiency.

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