Constrained Density Peak Clustering

Abstract

Clustering is a commonly used tool for discovering knowledge in data mining. Density peak clustering (DPC) has recently gained attention for its ability to detect clusters with various shapes and noise, using just one parameter. DPC has shown advantages over other methods, such as DBSCAN and K-means, but it struggles with datasets that have both high and low-density clusters. To overcome this limitation, the paper introduces a new semi-supervised DPC method that improves clustering results with a small set of constraints expressed as must-link and cannot-link. The proposed method combines constraints and a k-nearest neighbor graph to filter out peaks and find the center for each cluster. Constraints are also used to support label assignment during the clustering procedure. The efficacy of this method is demonstrated through experiments on well-known data sets from UCI and benchmarked against contemporary semi-supervised clustering techniques.