Clustering with Missing Features: A Density-Based Approach

Abstract

Density clustering has been widely used in many research disciplines to determine the structure of real-world datasets. Existing density clustering algorithms only work well on complete datasets. In real-world datasets, however, there may be missing feature values due to technical limitations. Many imputation methods used for density clustering cause the aggregation phenomenon. To solve this problem, a two-stage novel density peak clustering approach with missing features is proposed: First, the density peak clustering algorithm is used for the data with complete features, while the labeled core points that can represent the whole data distribution are used to train the classifier. Second, we calculate a symmetrical FWPD distance matrix for incomplete data points, then the incomplete data are imputed by the symmetrical FWPD distance matrix and classified by the classifier. The experimental results show that the proposed approach performs well on both synthetic datasets and real datasets.