Issues of grid-cluster retrievals in swarm-based clustering

Abstract

One common approach in swarm-based clustering is to use agents to create a set of clusters on a two-dimensional grid, and then use an existing clustering method to retrieve the clusters on the grid. The second step, which we call grid-cluster retrieval, is an essential step to obtain an explicit partitioning of data. In this study, we highlight the issues in grid-cluster retrievals commonly neglected by researchers, and demonstrate the non-trivial difficulties involved. To tackle the issues, we then evaluate three methods: K-means, hierarchical clustering (Weighted Single-link) and density-based clustering (DBScan). Among the three methods, DBScan is the only method which has not been previously used for grid-cluster retrievals, yet it is shown to be the most suitable method in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.