Approximate normalized cuts without Eigen-decomposition

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 $${d}_{c}$$ 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.

Spatial hazard assessment of the PM10 using machine learning models in Barcelona, Spain

Air pollution, and especially atmospheric particulate matter (PM), has a profound impact on human mortality and morbidity, environment, and ecological system. Accordingly, it is very relevant predicting air quality. Although the application of the machine learning (ML) models for predicting air quality parameters, such as PM concentrations, has been evaluated in previous studies, those on the spatial hazard modeling of them are very limited. Due to the high potential of the ML models, the spatial modeling of PM can help managers to identify the pollution hotspots. Accordingly, this study aims at developing new ML models, such as Random Forest (RF), Bagged Classification and Regression Trees (Bagged CART), and Mixture Discriminate Analysis (MDA) for the hazard prediction of PM10 (particles with a diameter less than 10 µm) in the Barcelona Province, Spain. According to the annual PM10 concentration in 75 stations, the healthy and unhealthy locations are determined, and a ratio 70/30 (53/22 stations) is applied for calibrating and validating the ML models to predict the most hazardous areas for PM10. In order to identify the influential variables of PM modeling, the simulated annealing (SA) feature selection method is used. Seven features, among the thirteen features, are selected as critical features. According to the results, all the three-machine learning (ML) models achieve an excellent performance (Accuracy > 87% and precision > 86%). However, the Bagged CART and RF models have the same performance and higher than the MDA model. Spatial hazard maps predicted by the three models indicate that the high hazardous areas are located in the middle of the Barcelona Province more than in the Barcelona's Metropolitan Area.