One-pass MapReduce-based clustering method for mixed large scale data

Abstract

Big data is often characterized by a huge volume and a mixed types of attributes namely, numeric and categorical. K-prototypes has been fitted into MapReduce framework and hence it has become a solution for clustering mixed large scale data. However, k-prototypes requires computing all distances between each of the cluster centers and the data points. Many of these distance computations are redundant, because data points usually stay in the same cluster after first few iterations. Also, k-prototypes is not suitable for running within MapReduce framework: the iterative nature of k-prototypes cannot be modeled through MapReduce since at each iteration of k-prototypes, the whole data set must be read and written to disks and this results a high input/output (I/O) operations. To deal with these issues, we propose a new one-pass accelerated MapReduce-based k-prototypes clustering method for mixed large scale data. The proposed method reads and writes data only once which reduces largely the I/O operations compared to existing MapReduce implementation of k-prototypes. Furthermore, the proposed method is based on a pruning strategy to accelerate the clustering process by reducing the redundant distance computations between cluster centers and data points. Experiments performed on simulated and real data sets show that the proposed method is scalable and improves the efficiency of the existing k-prototypes methods.