An autonomous centreless approach to chunk-wise data partitioning

Abstract In this paper, a novel autonomous centreless algorithm is proposed for data partitioning. The proposed algorithm firstly constructs the nearest neighbour affinity graph and identifies the local peaks of data density to build micro-clusters. Unlike the vast majority of partitional clustering algorithms, the proposed algorithm does not rely on singleton prototypes, namely, centres or medoids of the micro-clusters to partition the data space. Instead, these micro-clusters are directly utilised to attract nearby data samples to form shape-free Voronoi tessellations, hence, being centreless and robust to noisy data. A fusion scheme is further implemented to fuse these data clouds with higher intra-cluster similarity together to attain a more compact partitioning of data. The proposed algorithm is able to perform data partitioning on a chunk-wise basis and is highly computationally efficient with the default distance measure. Therefore, it is suitable for both static data partitioning in offline scenarios and streaming data partitioning in online scenarios. Numerical examples on a variety of benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.