A clustering method based on boosting

It is widely recognized that the boosting methodology provides superior results for classification problems. In this paper, we propose the boost-clustering algorithm which constitutes a novel clustering methodology that exploits the general principles of boosting in order to provide a consistent partitioning of a dataset. The boost-clustering algorithm is a multi-clustering method. At each boosting iteration, a new training set is created using weighted random sampling from the original dataset and a simple clustering algorithm (e.g. k-means) is applied to provide a new data partitioning. The final clustering solution is produced by aggregating the multiple clustering results through weighted voting. Experiments on both artificial and real-world data sets indicate that boost-clustering provides solutions of improved quality. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.