Multi-objective Clustering Algorithm with Parallel Games

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel multi-objective clustering algorithm based on game theory, specifically congestion games, which efficiently finds stable clusters with promising scalability and performance in data mining tasks.

Contribution

It introduces a game theory-based clustering method utilizing congestion games to improve multi-objective clustering performance.

Findings

Achieves good clustering results in experiments

Offers scalable and efficient clustering process

Demonstrates promising performance in data mining applications

Abstract

Data mining and knowledge discovery are two important growing research fields in the last two decades due to the abundance of data collected from various sources. The exponentially growing volumes of generated data urge the development of several mining techniques to feed the needs for automatically derived knowledge. Clustering analysis (finding similar groups of data) is a well-established and widely used approach in data mining and knowledge discovery. In this paper, we introduce a clustering technique that uses game theory models to tackle multi-objective application problems. The main idea is to exploit a specific type of simultaneous move games, called congestion games. Congestion games offer numerous advantages ranging from being succinctly represented to possessing Nash equilibrium that is reachable in a polynomial-time. The proposed algorithm has three main steps: 1) it starts by identifying the initial players (or the cluster-heads), 2) it establishes the initial clusters' composition by constructing the game and try to find the equilibrium of the game. The third step consists of merging close clusters to obtain the final clusters. The experimental results show that the proposed clustering approach obtains good results and it is very promising in terms of scalability and performance.