Improved Boundary Support Vector Clustering with Self-Adaption Support

Concerning the good description of arbitrarily shaped clusters, collecting accurate support vectors (SVs) is critical yet resource-consuming for support vector clustering (SVC). Even though SVs can be extracted from the boundaries for efficiency, boundary patterns with too much noise and inappropriate parameter settings, such as the kernel width, also confuse the connectivity analysis. Thus, we propose an improved boundary SVC (IBSVC) with self-adaption support for reasonable boundaries and comfortable parameters. The first self-adaption is in the movable edge selection (MES). By introducing a divide-and-conquer strategy with the k-means++ support, it collects local, informative, and reasonable edges for the minimal hypersphere construction while rejecting pseudo-borders and outliers. Rather than the execution of model learning with repetitive training and evaluation, we fuse the second self-adaption with the flexible parameter selection (FPS) for direct model construction. FPS automatically selects the kernel width to meet a conformity constraint, which is defined by measuring the difference between the data description drawn by the model and the actual pattern. Finally, IBSVC adopts a convex decomposition-based strategy to finish cluster checking and labeling even though there is no prior knowledge of the cluster number. Theoretical analysis and experimental results confirm that IBSVC can discover clusters with high computational efficiency and applicability.

Automated summary

This article proposes an improved boundary support vector clustering (IBSVC) method that achieves reasonable boundaries and comfortable parameters through self-adaptive support. The method enhances the accuracy and efficiency of clustering through movable edge selection and flexible parameter selection.