A novel density peaks clustering algorithm based on K nearest neighbors with adaptive merging strategy

Recently the density peaks clustering algorithm (DPC) has received a lot of attention from researchers. The DPC algorithm is able to find cluster centers and complete clustering tasks quickly. It is also suitable for different kinds of clustering tasks. However, deciding the cutoff distance $${d}_{c}$$ largely depends on human experience which greatly affects clustering results. In addition, the selection of cluster centers requires manual participation which affects the efficiency of the algorithm. In order to solve these problems, we propose a density peaks clustering algorithm based on K nearest neighbors with adaptive merging strategy (KNN-ADPC). A clusters merging strategy is proposed to automatically aggregate over-segmented clusters. Additionally, the K nearest neighbors are adopted to divide data points more reasonably. There is only one parameter in KNN-ADPC algorithm, and the clustering task can be conducted automatically without human involvement. The experiment results on artificial and real-world datasets prove higher accuracy of KNN-ADPC compared with DBSCAN, K-means++, DPC, and DPC-KNN.