Clustering is the unsupervised classification of patterns (observations, data items, or feature vectors) into groups (clusters). The clustering problem has been addressed in many contexts and by researchers in many disciplines; this reflects its broad appeal and usefulness as one of the steps in exploratory data analysis. However, clustering is a difficult problem combinatorially, and differences in assumptions and contexts in different communities has made the transfer of useful generic concepts and methodologies slow to occur. This paper presents an overview of pattern clustering methods from a statistical pattern recognition perspective, with a goal of providing useful advice and references to fundamental concepts accessible to the broad community of clustering practitioners. We present a taxonomy of clustering techniques, and identify cross-cutting themes and recent advances. We also describe some important applications of clustering algorithms such as image segmentation, object recognition, and information retrieval.

The primary goal of pattern recognition is supervised or unsupervised classification. Among the various frameworks in which pattern recognition has been traditionally formulated, the statistical approach has been most intensively studied and used in practice. More recently, neural network techniques and methods imported from statistical learning theory have bean receiving increasing attention. The design of a recognition system requires careful attention to the following issues: definition of pattern classes, sensing environment, pattern representation, feature extraction and selection, cluster analysis, classifier design and learning, selection of training and test samples, and performance evaluation. In spite of almost 50 years of research and development in this field, the general problem of recognizing complex patterns with arbitrary orientation, location, and scale remains unsolved. New and emerging applications, such as data mining, web searching, retrieval of multimedia data, face recognition, and cursive handwriting recognition, require robust and efficient pattern recognition techniques. The objective of this review paper is to summarize and compare some of the well-known methods used in various stages of a pattern recognition system and identify research topics and applications which are at the forefront of this exciting and challenging field.

We present a new strategy called “curvilinear component analysis” (CCA) for dimensionality reduction and representation of multidimensional data sets. The principle of CCA is a self-organized neural network performing two tasks: vector quantization (VQ) of the submanifold in the data set (input space) and nonlinear projection (P) of these quantizing vectors toward an output space, providing a revealing unfolding of the submanifold. After learning, the network has the ability to continuously map any new point from one space into another: forward mapping of new points in the input space, or backward mapping of an arbitrary position in the output space.

Finding structures in vast multidimensional data sets, be they measurement data, statistics, or textual documents, is difficult and time-consuming. Interesting, novel relations between the data items may be hidden in the data. The selforganizing map (SOM) algorithm of Kohonen can be used to aid the exploration: the structures in the data sets can be illustrated on special map displays. In this work, the methodology of using SOMs for exploratory data analysis or data mining is reviewed and developed further. The properties of the maps are compared with the properties of related methods intended for visualizing highdimensional multivariate data sets. In a set of case studies the SOM algorithm is applied to analyzing electroencephalograms, to illustrating structures of the standard of living in the world, and to organizing full-text document collections. Measures are proposed for evaluating the quality of different types of maps in representing a given data set, and for measuring the robu...

The Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is an efficient tool for visualization of multidimensional numerical data. In this paper, an overview and categorization of both old and new methods for the visualization of SOM is presented. The purpose is to give an idea of what kind of information can be acquired from different presentations and how the SOM can best be utilized in exploratory data visualization. Most of the presented methods can also be applied in the more general case of first making a vector quantization (e.g. k-means) and then a vector projection (e.g. Sammon's mapping).

Pattern recognition generally requires that objects be described in terms of a set of measurable features. The selection and quality of the features representing each pattern has a considerable bearing on the success of subsequent pattern classification. Feature extraction is the process of deriving new features from the original features in order to reduce the cost of feature measurement, increase classifier efficiency, and allow higher classification accuracy. Many current feature extraction techniques involve linear transformations of the original pattern vectors to new vectors of lower dimensionality. While this is useful for data visualization and increasing classification efficiency, it does not necessarily reduce the number of features that must be measured, since each new feature may be a linear combination of all of the features in the original pattern vector. Here we present a new approach to feature extraction in which feature selection, feature extraction, and classifier training are performed simultaneously using a genetic algorithm. The genetic algorithm optimizes a vector of feature weights, which are used to scale the individual features in the original pattern vectors in either a linear or a nonlinear fashion. A masking vector is also employed to perform simultaneous selection of a subset of the features. We employ this technique in combination with the k-nearest-neighbor classification rule, and compare the results with classical feature selection and extraction techniques, including sequential floating forward feature selection, and linear discriminant analysis. We also present results for identification of favorable water binding sites on protein surfaces, an important problem in biochemistry and drug design.

A recent novel approach to the visualisation and analysis of datasets, and one which is particularly applicable to those of a high dimension, is discussed in the context of real applications. A feed-forward neural network is utilised to effect a topographic, structure-preserving, dimension-reducing transformation of the data, with an additional facility to incorporate different degrees of associated subjective information. The properties of this transformation are illustrated on synthetic and real datasets, including the 1992 UK Research Assessment Exercise for funding in higher education. The method is compared and contrasted to established techniques for feature extraction, and related to topographic mappings, the Sammon projection and the statistical field of multidimensional scaling. 1 INTRODUCTION The visualisation and analysis of high-dimensional data is a difficult problem and one that may be helpfully viewed in the context of feature extraction, which provides a useful commo...

In several real-life data-mining... This paper proposes a relationship-based approach that alleviates both problems, side-stepping the "curse-of-dimensionality" issue by working in a suitable similarity space instead of the original high-dimensional attribute space. This intermediary similarity space can be suitably tailored to satisfy business criteria such as requiring customer clusters to represent comparable amounts of revenue. We apply efficient and scalable graph-partitioning-based clustering techniques in this space. The output from the clustering algorithm is used to re-order the data points so that the resulting permuted similarity matrix can be readily visualized in two dimensions, with clusters showing up as bands. While two-dimensional visualization of a similarity matrix is by itself not novel, its combination with the order-sensitive partitioning of a graph that captures the relevant similarity measure between objects provides three powerful properties: (i) the high-dimensionality of the data does not affect further processing once the similarity space is formed; (ii) it leads to clusters of (approximately) equal importance, and (iii) related clusters show up adjacent to one another, further facilitating the visualization of results. The visualization is very helpful for assessing and improving clustering. For example, actionable recommendations for splitting or merging of clusters can be easily derived, and it also guides the user toward the right number of clusters

This paper presents and evaluates two linear feature extractors based on mutual information. These feature extractors consider general dependencies between features and class labels, as opposed to well known linear methods such as PCA which does not consider class labels and LDA, which uses only simple low order dependencies. As evidenced by several simulations on high dimensional data sets, the proposed techniques provide superior feature extraction and better dimensionality reduction while having similar computational requirements. 1. Introduction The capabilities of a classifier are ultimately limited by the quality of the features in each input vector. In particular, when the measurement space is highdimensional but the number of samples is limited, one is faced with the "curse of dimensionality" problem during training [3]. Feature extraction is often used to alleviate this problem. Although linear feature extractors are ultimately less flexible than the more general non-linear ...

Mappings that preserve neighbourhood relationships are important in many contexts, from neurobiology to multivariate data analysis. It is important to be clear about precisely what is meant by preserving neighbourhoods. At least three issues have to be addressed: how neighbourhoods are defined, how a perfectly neighbourhood preserving mapping is defined, and how an objective function for measuring discrepancies from perfect neighbourhood preservation is defined. We review several standard methods, and using a simple example mapping problem show that the different assumptionsof each lead to non-trivially different answers. We also introduce a particular measure for topographic distortion, which has the form of a quadratic assignmentproblem. Many previous methods are closely related to this measure, which thus serves to unify disparate approaches. 1 Introduction Problems of mapping occur frequently both in understanding biological processes and in formulating abstract methods of data an...