DCAD: a dual clustering algorithm for distributed spatial databases

Abstract

Spatial objects have two types of attributes: geometrical attributes and non-geometrical attributes, which belong to two different attribute domains (geometrical and non-geometrical domains). Although geometrically scattered in a geometrical domain, spatial objects may be similar to each other in a non-geometrical domain. Most existing clustering algorithms group spatial datasets into different compact regions in a geometrical domain without considering the aspect of a non-geometrical domain. However, many application scenarios require clustering results in which a cluster has not only high proximity in a geometrical domain, but also high similarity in a non-geometrical domain. This means constraints are imposed on the clustering goal from both geometrical and non-geometrical domains simultaneously. Such a clustering problem is called dual clustering. As distributed clustering applications become more and more popular, it is necessary to tackle the dual clustering problem in distributed databases. The DCAD algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. DCAD consists of two levels of clustering: local clustering and global clustering. First, clustering is conducted at each local site with a local clustering algorithm, and the features of local clusters are extracted. Second, local features from each site are sent to a central site where global clustering is obtained based on those features. Experiments on both artificial and real spatial datasets show that DCAD is effective and efficient.