A weighting k-modes algorithm for subspace clustering of categorical data

Traditional clustering algorithms consider all of the dimensions of an input data set equally. However, in the high dimensional data, a common property is that data points are highly clustered in subspaces, which means classes of objects are categorized in subspaces rather than the entire space. Subspace clustering is an extension of traditional clustering that seeks to find clusters in different subspaces within a data set. In this paper, a weighting k-modes algorithm is presented for subspace clustering of categorical data and its corresponding time complexity is analyzed as well. In the proposed algorithm, an additional step is added to the k-modes clustering process to automatically compute the weight of all dimensions in each cluster by using complement entropy. Furthermore, the attribute weight can be used to identify the subsets of important dimensions that categorize different clusters. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated with real data sets and synthetic data sets. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.