Clustering of symbolic interval data based on a single adaptive L1 distance

Abstract

The recording of symbolic interval data has become a common practice with the recent advances in database technologies. This paper introduces a dynamic clustering method to partitioning symbolic interval data. This method furnishes a partition and a prototype for each cluster by optimizing an adequacy criterion that measures the fitting between the clusters and their representatives. To compare symbolic interval data, the method uses a single adaptive L1 distance that at each iteration changes but is the same for all the clusters. Experiments with real and synthetic symbolic interval data sets showed the usefulness of the proposed method.