α-Clusterable Sets

In spite of the increasing interest into clustering research within the last decades, a unified clustering theory that is independent of a particular algorithm, or underlying the data structure and even the objective function has not be formulated so far. In the paper at hand, we take the first steps towards a theoretical foundation of clustering, by proposing a new notion of "clusterability" of data sets based on the density of the data within a specific region. Specifically, we give a formal definition of what we call "α-clusterable" set and we utilize this notion to prove that the principles proposed in Kleinberg’s impossibility theorem for clustering [25], are consistent. We further propose an unsupervised clustering algorithm which is based on the notion of α-clusterable set. The proposed algorithm exploits the ability of the well known and widely used particle swarm optimization [31] to maximize the recently proposed window density function [38]. The obtained clustering quality is compared favorably to the corresponding clustering quality of various other well-known clustering algorithms.