A Simple Tandem Method for Clustering of Multimodal Dataset

The presence of local features within clusters incurred by multi-modal nature of data prohibits many conventional clustering techniques from working properly. Especially, the clustering of datasets with non-Gaussian distributions within a cluster can be problematic when the technique with implicit assumption of Gaussian distribution is used. Current study proposes a simple tandem clustering method composed of k-means type algorithm and hierarchical method to solve such problems. The multi-modal dataset is first divided into many small pre-clusters by k-means or fuzzy k-means algorithm. The pre-clusters found from the first step are to be clustered again using agglomerative hierarchical clustering method with Kullback- Leibler divergence as the measure of dissimilarity. This method is not only effective at extracting the multi-modal clusters but also fast and easy in terms of computation complexity and relatively robust at the presence of outliers. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated on three generated datasets and six sets of publicly known real world data.