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The aim of this paper is to design an algorithm based on nonsmooth optimization techniques to solve the minimum sum-of-squares clustering problems in very large data sets. First, the clustering problem is formulated as a nonsmooth optimization problem. Then the limited memory bundle method [Haarala et al., 2007] is modified and combined with an incremental approach to design a new clustering algorithm. The algorithm is evaluated using real world data sets with both the large number of attributes and the large number of data points. It is also compared with some other optimization based clustering algorithms. The numerical results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithm for clustering in very large data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Due to data sparseness and attribute redundancy in high-dimensional data, clusters of objects often exist in subspaces rather than in the entire space. To effectively address this issue, this paper presents a new optimization algorithm for clustering high-dimensional categorical data, which is an extension of the k-modes clustering algorithm. In the proposed algorithm, a novel weighting technique for categorical data is developed to calculate two weights for each attribute (or dimension) in each cluster and use the weight values to identify the subsets of important attributes that categorize different clusters. The convergence of the algorithm under an optimization framework is proved. The performance and scalability of the algorithm is evaluated experimentally on both synthetic and real data sets. The experimental studies show that the proposed algorithm is effective in clustering categorical data sets and also scalable to large data sets owning to its linear time complexity with respect to the number of data objects, attributes or clusters. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]