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1)4#6789:
A Critical Review of Density-based Data Stream
Clustering Techniques
Affan Ahmad Toor, Muhammad Usman
Department of Computer Science
Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and
Technology, Pakistan
affan.toor85@gmail.com, dr.usman@szabist-isb.edu.pk
Abstract—Data stream is relatively new and emerging domain
in the current era of Internet advancement. Clustering data
streams is equally important and difficult because of the
numerous hurdles attached to it. A number of algorithms have
been proposed to offer solutions for efficient clustering. Grid-
based clustering approach was adopted few years ago to
overcome the limitations of conventional partition-based
algorithms for data stream clustering. Data points are mapped to
the grid-cells to form micro-clusters which later are used for
clustering. Using density in the clustering process is proved to be
a remarkable success and in recent years many researchers have
used density to find arbitrary shaped & density clusters and
identify outliers. Concept of density-based clustering is to use
grid-based clustering at core and create a distinction between
dense and sparse grids using density threshold values and use
dense grids to yield clustering results; which provide more
cluster purity and accuracy. In this paper, we reviewed grid-
based data stream clustering algorithms which utilize density.
We evaluated their functionalities and identified their limitations.
In the end, we critically evaluated different aspects of algorithms
and suggested one of these algorithms which is better in terms of
performance and accuracy.
Keywords—Data Streams, Data Stream Mining, Density-based
Clustering, Density-grid clustering
I. INTRODUCTION
With the evolution of internet the amount of data being
transferred at daily basis has increased rapidly over the past
few years. It is very important to mine this data to extract
valuable information and make sense out of it. But the
conventional mining algorithms are not designed to process
such huge and continuously flowing data. There are many
clustering techniques which were previously used on large
amount of data but they have certain limitations and drawbacks
when they are applied to data streams. So need of creating new
algorithms to cope with data streams was recognized and in
past few years’ lot of research work has been done in this
regard.
This review explores few of density-based data stream
clustering techniques and tries to develop understanding on
how these algorithms work, what challenges they face and
what issues they resolve. Although these algorithms target
978-1-5090-2641-8/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
51
Waseem Ahmed
School of Computing
Waiariki Institute of Technology, New Zealand
waseem.ahmad@waiariki.ac.nz
different research areas and domain but they have same goal to
cluster data streams and to some extent, they face similar issues
like not being able to identify arbitrary shaped or density
clusters, unable to handle noise and boundary points, etc.
The biggest challenge in stream clustering is the huge
amount of data which cannot be saved or processed in memory
and the speed of stream which is so fast that we do not have
enough time to process incoming data. To handle these
challenges, an online/offline component based structure was
introduced by Aggarwal [13] in CluStream algorithm which
was so effective that almost the entire stream clustering
algorithms after CluStream followed same structure. The
online component fetches data from stream and stores in
micro-clusters and offline components applies clustering
algorithm on those micro-clusters to perform clustering.
Use of grids in clustering algorithms was a big leap forward
in data stream mining. Previously partitioning-based clustering
was used which divides data into 2 partitions and then apply
clustering techniques to both partitions and finally merging the
partitions to form final clusters. The grid-based technique
solved the problem of finding clusters of arbitrary nature and
also it was able to identify noise points in data. The data points
are plotted in grid-cells and the neighboring non-empty grid
cells are processed further to form the final clusters. Another
valuable addition to this process was introducing the use of
density. It is a calculated value assigned to each grid-cell which
defines the importance of each data point as well as the
cumulative weightage of each grid. This density-based process
has increased the clustering purity and efficiency to a great
deal.
The purpose of this study is to explore the available
density-based stream clustering algorithms, their application in
various domains and the problems they solve in order to
achieve efficiency. This study is helpful in choosing a stream
clustering algorithm on basis of performance enhancements
and problems addressed by them. The methodology used for
this study is firstly, selecting research papers published in 2010
and onward, so that most recent research is included. Further,
the evaluation is done in ascending order of the publication
year, which shows the gradual progress in the algorithms and
changes in the methodology used overtime. Lastly, we used
attributes like dataset, dimensions, data size, stream speed, etc.
to show a comparison of the kind of environment in which
these algorithms were evaluated. Also, we portrayed the
performance comparison of these algorithms on basis of
common problems addressed and performance enhancements
made.
The organization of the rest of the paper is as follows.
Section II discusses in detail the literature review. Section III
provides critical evaluation along with comparison tables and
finally Section IV presents the conclusion of the study.
II. LITERATURE REVIEW
A. AGDStream
Yang et al. in [1] emphasize on the importance of mining
data streams in current era of IT advancement when our lives
are flooded with more data we can handle every day. Data
streams can only be mined in a sequence within a limited
timeframe which makes the existing clustering algorithm
useless. A new algorithm Active Grid Density Stream (AGS-
Stream) is proposed to solve these problems; this algorithm
makes use of the density grid decaying technology to identify
active grids and creates clusters from them.
CluStream algorithm can cluster data streams but it can
only form clusters of spherical shape and fails when it comes to
arbitrary shaped clusters. Another drawback of CluStream is
that it cannot handle boundary points which results in low
cluster accuracy. This algorithm works on offline-online
components. The online component either forms new micro-
clusters from stream or merges the data in existing relevant
micro-clusters. The offline component applies k-means
algorithm on micro-clusters to obtain final clusters. Few other
algorithms like ACluStream, DenStream, D-Stream and RCTS
were able to find arbitrary shaped clusters but these involve
some other complexities which make them less efficient in real
time environment.
The proposed AGD-Stream algorithm divides the data
space grid into a grid structure by forming small cube grids and
then maps data steam to this structure. This concept is referred
to as grid density. The purpose of density decaying technology
is to extract the boundary points of grid, which are later used to
process the active grid density. The paper introduces the
concept of activity that is used to find the grid density. Inactive
grid density represents a sparse grid which means no new data
is arriving, such grids are excluded. On the other hand, an
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active grid means it has up to date data so it is kept and used
for clustering process.
The experiments to compare AGDStream with CluStream
showed that the proposed algorithm is time efficient and
improves with the increase of stream length. Further clustering
accuracy was tested by dividing data into 3 classes and
overtime the accuracy was found to be better than CluStream.
B. SDSStream
Ren et al. in [2] highlights the increasing importance of
data stream clustering and more specifically adaptation of
subspace clustering model in today’s technology trends.
Subspace clustering is defined as a process of finding all
clusters hidden in subspaces formed by some degree of
relevance in the dimensions. The existing techniques either do
not provide solution for streaming data or they work on
decayed window model which relies heavily on historical data.
A new algorithm SDSStream is proposed to solve these
problems. SDSStream combines subspace and sliding window
model to cluster stream data.
CLIQUE, which is a grid-based subspace clustering
algorithm starts processing with one dimensional dense units
and computes (k+1) dimensional dense units. After considering
dense grids using entropy measure, the data is plotted in
adaptive grids and parallel processed to obtain effective results.
Drawback of this technique is that it loses effectiveness in case
of large datasets like in data stream. Later, many algorithms
such as GCHDS, Park, HPStream, etc. were introduced which
were able to process stream data and also applied subspace
concept. But they all perform clustering on decayed window
model. To overcome this problem a sliding window model was
developed and used in many algorithms. In sliding window
model an exponential histogram technique is used to keep track
of variance in data elements overtime.
The proposed algorithm SDSStream extends the sliding
window model and introduces weighted sliding window model.
In this framework the time defines a window’s size to eliminate
the irregularities. Also the recent data is assigned more
weightage than the old one so that the relevance and
effectiveness of data remain intact. SDSStream makes use of
features like EHCF and TCF to form and maintain micro
clusters and to sum up the results core-micro-clusters are
extracted from those micro clusters. New data points are either
identified as potential micro-clusters or outlier micro-clusters
and are assigned weights accordingly.
Since the SDSStream algorithm extends the CluStream
algorithm, so the results are compared with CluStream. For fair
comparison of EHCFs in SDSStream and micro-clusters in
CluStream were kept same. Results shows that SDSStream out
performs CluStream in cluster quality, which is measured by
purity of each cluster. Further execution time of online
component of proposed algorithm is faster with one snapshot
per 100 second cycle and it also improves with passage of time.
Finally SDSStream showed better memory usage with window
size from 10000 to 100000.
C. MDStream
Magdy et al. in [3] discusses the increasing trend of data
stream with advancement of hardware devices and internet.
Wireless sensors, network traffic, e-commerce transactions,
etc. are the main sources of data stream. The nature of data
streams is different from static data as it contains non-static
free flowing data points which cause few limitations like
limited memory support and limited time constraint. Though
data streams algorithms have evolved in recent years and now
they can identify clusters of arbitrary shapes but still they are
not able to identify clusters of arbitrary densities. The reason
could be the use of static density parameters.
Previously, a stream clustering technique named k-median
was proposed, which divides data into two partitions and each
part is clustered separately before finally merging all parts to
form the final clusters. Another algorithm STREAM was later
proposed to enhance the capability of k-median by producing
the centers at each stage. CluStream is another algorithm which
introduced an offline/online component mechanism to cluster
stream data. Online component is responsible for extracting
data from stream and offline component applies k-means on
data to form clusters.
A grid-based algorithm DStream maps the data points to
grid cells with the help of its online component. The density of
each grid is represented by the total points assigned to that grid.
Dense grid cells are grouped together to make clusters using
the offline component. A density threshold function
distinguishes between sparse and dense grids. Later few
modifications were also made to DStream to improve the
performance but it is still not able to identify clusters of
arbitrary densities. Furthermore the outliers are not properly
handled and the parameter selection for clustering result
sensitivity is also ignored.
The proposed algorithm MDStream targets these problems
and offers solution. It follows grid-based approach by dividing
data into grid-cells but also avoids overlapping. The resultant
cube-shaped grids make efficient use of memory. Grid density
is calculated using a decay factor model and a dynamic range
neighborhood mechanism enables algorithm to discover
clusters with arbitrary shaped densities. The online component
reads stream and creates or merges the data points into grids.
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The offline component not only assigns a grid cell to a new
density-based cluster but it also merges related neighbor
clusters until a final cluster is formed.
The experimental evaluation of MDStream compares the
relative density relatedness and dynamic range neighborhood
factors. The results are compared with DStream algorithm
using both synthetic and real data sets. Cluster quality and
efficiency are measured in terms of cluster purity and resource
utilization respectively. The results showed that MDStream
was not only able to find clusters with arbitrary densities but
also it was scalable in terms of execution time and data size.
D. DDBound
Zhang et al. in [4] points out that with recent emergence of
real time data streams there is a need to develop tools and
techniques to explore the stream and make use of it. Boundary
pattern algorithms are gaining popularity and many researchers
have developed solutions based on boundary pattern.
BORDER, BRIM and GBCB are few algorithms which are
used for boundary point detection but these algorithms have
few limitations, discussed in detail below, which creates
demands for further research in this area.
BORDER makes use of reverse k-nearest neighbor
(RKNN) technique to detect boundary points. It finds out the
RKNNs of every data point and then sort them and picks any
given number of objects as boundary points. BORDER works
fine in any regular dataset but fails when data have noise.
Further calculating RKNN and sorting repeatedly takes up lot
of resources and also it is dependent on some prior knowledge
to execute algorithm. Another algorithm BRIM is able to
separate boundary points from noise points by using the border
degree calculations. However it is still not very accurate and
has high computational cost. GBCB algorithm also overcame
the problem of noise point recognition by using the restricted
k-nearest algorithm. But since it needs to collect the knowledge
of all boundary points, it becomes more and more complex and
resource hungry.
The proposed algorithm DDBound is based on damped
window model and is able to overcome shortcomings of above
mentioned algorithms. DDBound maps each point to a grid and
then calculates density threshold to point divided grids into
high density and low density grids. A maximal density grid is
discovered among high density grids by iterating through data
points. This maximal density grid is considered the starting
point for a depth first search to cluster the connected high
density grids and their respective transitional density grids. In
the end all the boundary grid clusters are extracted to form the
final results.
 The experimental studies conducted to see the results of
DDBound compared the results with BORDER algorithm.
BORDER was unable to identify boundaries properly since it
also showed noise points separately whereas DDBound
handled the noise points. Also, DDBound was able to
recognize clusters of arbitrary shapes and sizes.
E. GRDCluStream
Gao et al. in [5] states that the main source of data streams
is sensors and the advancement in the sensor technologies in
recent years. Due to the characteristics of data streams
researchers have tried to develop algorithms that can cluster
data by one-off scanning.
Previously algorithms like LOCALSEARCH, STREAM,
BIRCH, etc. have proposed which try to cope with data stream
challenges but they lacked the ability to handle dynamic nature
of data streams. CluStream was a major progress in this regard,
which introduced online/offline components to cluster stream
data. Later, ACluStream enhanced the capabilities of
CluStream and was able to form arbitrary shaped clusters. But
this also has limitation of not being able to provide multi-
density functionality
GRDCluStream adopts the clustering model of CluStream
algorithm and in addition uses relative density parameter to
improve density calculation process. The online process of
GRDCluStream reads data from stream and saves it in form of
time frame pyramids. The reason this algorithm is labeled as
‘kind’ of data stream clustering algorithm is that it mainly
emphasizes on the online process and leaves offline process to
be done using any clustering algorithm of choice. The online
process referred as Gad_Mac, calculates attenuation
coefficient, support of each grid and eigenvectors of mesh
elements. These variables are then used in the polymerization
process.
When comparing GRDCluStream with other algorithms, it
not only takes in account the impact of surrounding data
elements in grids but also quantifies them into mesh density
and makes the algorithm behave according to the situation and
meanwhile maintaining a low time complexity makes it very
effective.
F. RA-DCluster
Chao et al. in [6] highlights the importance of data stream
mining because of the ever growing stream data continuously
generated from sensors, stock market, online clicks, telecom,
etc. although there has been lot of progress in the
computational capabilities of mobile devices but still they are
unable to perform complex data mining functions. This
requires the need of developing new mining algorithms which
54
are resource aware and works well within limitations of
memory and also has less battery consumption.
CluStream algorithm introduced the mechanism of having
two components of algorithm i.e. an online and an offline
component. Since then it is extensively used in the data stream
clustering algorithms. DenStream adopted this approach and
extended the DBSCAN algorithm to perform the density based
clustering. The online component of DenStream reads stream
and creates micro clusters which are later used by offline
component to perform clustering. Another density based
algorithm DStream divides the space into small grids and plots
data into those grids based upon their densities, which are later
merged according to the updated densities to form clusters.
Although these algorithms perform density based clustering
quite efficiently but they are not resource aware. The first
algorithm to consider the resource conditions was RA-Cluster.
It adjusts its parameters according to available memory and
remaining battery. However it is not capable of finding
arbitrary densities in streams.
The proposed RA-DCluster algorithm not only keeps track
of available resources but also performs grid and density based
clustering. In the online component of the algorithm, records
are mapped to dynamic grids using the sliding window model.
The offline component performs density based clustering and
also uses a resource monitor to check the available resources.
In case if low memory or battery, window size is reduced and
grid size is increased. During clustering if resources are
insufficient, number of sparse grids is reduced by increasing
the density threshold. Even at the critical battery level, the
clustering results are still generated by prioritizing the
unprocessed grids on basis of lowest density.
The comparison of RA-Dcluster with RA-Cluster shows
better efficiency, accuracy, memory usage and battery
consumption. The experimental result show that number of
points processed per second is better than RA-Cluster and also
it is scalable. The comparison of memory and battery usage
also shows that RA-DCluster adapts to available memory with
passage of time.
G. HDDStream
Ntoutsi et al. in [7] emphasizes the importance choosing
relevant attributes in mining the high dimensional datasets.
With data streams this becomes more difficult as we have to
select appropriate attributes within a time window before the
concept drift or concept shift takes place. The approaches used
to cluster high dimensional stream data have issues like
assuming that cluster count remains constant throughout the
life cycle and using non-partitioning based approaches which
are not able to identify the clusters in subspaces. three types of
clustering approaches have been researched on i.e. density
based, high dimensinal and full dimensional space for data
streams.
Density based clustering being a non-parametric approach
does not require parameters like number of clusters or any
other prior knowledge before clustering. This simplifies the
clustering however it does not peovide any working model or
insights to the discovered clusters. The idea of high
dimensional data clustering is that due to irrelevence of many
attributes/features in context of whole space, the clustering is
done more accurately in the subspaces using local features
which have relevence or correlation with that specific
subspace. Two approaches used in subspace clustering are
bottom up and top down. First one computes all clusters in all
subspace and later one avoids overlapping and uses disjoint
instead. The problem with those approaches is that they have
too much redundancy and projected clustering in a disjoint
group. Clustering stream data has always been a challenge
because of the stream size and time window keeping in mind
the resource constraints.
The proposed algorithm HDDStream clusters the streams
in a three step process. In first step i.e. initialization, micro
clusters are extracted using the PreDeCon algorithm. This
basically computes the d-dimensional neighborhood value for
the all points and then distributes points into micro clusters
based on the variance and preference vectors. Second step is to
maintain online microcluster, which is responsible for
distinguishing between projected microclusters and outlier
microclusters. Final step is offline clustering which uses a
variant of PreDeCon algorithm to form clusters. Each
microcluster which is also a core projected microcluster is
assumed as the starting point. Neighbors of this cluster
becomes seeds to expand the cluster and finilize the clustering
process.
HDDStream is compared with HPStream algorithm to show
the performance improvement. Clustering quality is measured
by means of average percentage of true class labels in a cluster.
The memory usage is measured by simultaniously maintaining
microcluster at a given time. Several experiments conducted on
different datasets showed that both cluster purity and memory
consumption is better than HPStream.
H. Modified DenStream
According to Vallim et al. in [8], data streams are so huge
that performing analysis on them becomes a challanging task.
The data stream algorithm must work incremental in order to
analyze continuously flowing data. Proper handling of concept
drift is an important aspect because if behavioral changes of
streams are ignored then the performance is gradually
55
degraded. Two approaches are used for behavioral change
detection, i.e. supervised and unsupervised. Supervised
approach monitors the perfoamnce measures with help of
prioir knowledge and detects when there is a loss in quality.
Whereas unsupervised approach uses clustering techniques to
detect behavioral changes without any prioir knowledge.
The supervised approach for behavior change detection is
more suitable for the streams which provide information about
class labels. This informaiton is used to moniter the measures
like accuracy, recall, etc. This approach fails when there is no
class labeling provided, for that purpose the unsupervised
approach e.g. clustering is used. Algorithms like Growing k-
means, OLINDDA, SLC, etc. are incremental based clustering
examples of concept drift detection. Some neural network
based approaches like SOM, GWR, SONDE, etc. are also
effectie in this regard.
The new proposed algorithm is a modified version of
DenStream algorithm which is 2 phase clustering process for
density based streams. In the conventional DenStream
algorithm online phase distributes the data points into
potential microclusters and outlier microclusters on basis of
weightage. In the offline phase the clustering is done using the
DBSCAN algorithm. The modified version of DenStream
handles the densities as well as implements the concept drift
detection technique. Unlike DenStream, this modified version
calculates the entropy levels for microclusters and keeps
history of them which are later used to detect any novel
change of event that indicates the concept drift. The
experiments show that the modified DenStream performs
better than conventional DenStream. Keeping history of the
microclusters improves the ability to detect behavoral changes
accurately.
I. DCUStream
Yang et al. in [9] points out that due to some internal and
external environmental factors the amount of uncertain data is
increasing day by day. Specifically Radio Frequency
Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)
produce lot of uncertain data due to lack of energy, cost, etc.
and also due to high error rate. With the emergence of Things
Internet technology it is necessary to develop data mining
techniques to utilize the uncertain data streams and perform
useful analysis.
Previously an algorithm named UMicro was proposed to
cluster data streams of uncertain nature. In this algorithm an
uncertain feature was used to compute cluster center and
radius. Another such algorithm addressed the problem of
“curse of dimensionality” and few other algorithms used
entropy information to overcome the uncertainty of data
streams. These are attribute-level uncertainty approaches
however another algorithm named EMicro was proposed to
offer an existence-level uncertain data solution. Few problems
which these algorithms have are that they are unable to form
arbitrary shaped clusters and newly arriving and existing data
are treated same way which is not practical approach as the
quality of existing data may vary with passage of time.
The proposed algorithm DCUStream addresses these
problems and perform density based clustering on uncertain
data streams. In this algorithm grid is partitioned into multiple
hypercubes within data space. Then a weight value is
calculated and grids are distributed and labeled in sparse and
dense grids according to the weight value. After that the
existence-uncertain factor and tense factors are used to
classify the data points. Finally when it comes to clustering,
core dense grids are identified and using the depth first search
their neighbors are assembled into clusters. The sparse grids
represent the boundary points and are processed for noise
point detection. The process goes on until all data points are
either assigned to sparse grids or dense grids.
The experimental results of DCUStream are compared
with EMicro algorithm. Average quality of cluster of
DCUStream was found to be better than EMicro clusters
which is probably because EMicro creates sphere shaped
clusters as compared to DCUStream which creates arbitrary
shaped clusters. Also the DCUStream is more time efficient
because EMicro is k-means based algorithm which requires
complex calculation hence taking more time and resources.
J. PKS-Stream-1
Zhang et al. in [10] divides the data stream clustering
algorithms into two categories, i.e. single stage processing
model algorithms and two-phase processing model algorithms.
The first one partitions stream into small chunks and clusters
them one by one. Those algorithms are mostly based on k-
means and use an iterative approach to discover cluster by
assigning equal weights to all clusters. This process however
ignores the evolution of stream and after some time the cluster
become outdated. The two-phase processing model (e.g.
CluStream) consists of an online and an offline phase. The
online phase reads the raw data from stream and saves it with
some information. The offline phase takes this data and
performs k-means based clustering.
Few limitations of two-phase model are that they are not
able to identify arbitrary shaped clusters as well as noise
points. Also it requires prior knowledge of data points. PKS-
Stream algorithm is a combination of density and grid based
algorithms. With the help of Pks-tree technique the non-empty
grid cells are stored and a method is devised which decides
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that for how long density needs to be calculated before
finalizing the clusters.
The PKS-Stream-1 is the proposed algorithm which
extends the functionality and enhances performance of PKS-
Stream. This algorithm omits the empty or less frequent used
grids to save resources and increase efficiency. The grids are
partitioned with multiple granularities and any grid is subject
to be further partitioned into sub-grid. The Pks-tree is then
used to traverse these sub-grids and pick the non-empty cells
which will be later used to form the clusters.
The comparison of PKS-Stream-1 and PKS-Stream is done
by experimenting with multiple datasets measuring the cluster
quality and scalability. The cluster purity and entropy
represents the quality of cluster which in this case is found
better in PKS-Stream-1. The clustering execution time
becomes more or less same in both algorithms if the speed of
data stream in increased. However, when the scalability in
terms of memory consumption is measured, PKS-Stream-1
was found to be taking much less memory than PKS-Stream.
K. MuDi Stream
Armini et al. in [11] mentions various application areas of
data stream mining such as network traffic anomaly detection,
web searches, sensor monitoring, social networks, etc. In these
domains the data arrives at a continuous rate and in huge
amounts so mining such data has some special requirements
and limitations. Processing density based data is one of the
attributes which a data stream clustering algorithm must have.
Previously density based algorithms like Den-Stream, D-
Stream and MR-Stream works well but they have limitation
when it comes to multi-density data. Though there exists few
multi-density clustering algorithms but they are not meant for
handling data streams, instead they are suitable for static data.
A new algorithm MuDi-Stream is proposed which is not only
able to handle data streams but also can cope with multi-
density clusters.
The clustering algorithms are classified in four categories,
i.e. Partitioning based clustering, Hierarchical clustering,
Grid-based clustering and Density-based clustering. The
proposed algorithm lies under density based clustering
technique. It has a tree-like structure which keeps track of
each node’s parent and child and uses this information to
create clusters that are improved in performance. Few existing
density-based algorithms such as D-Stream and FlockStream
are mentioned. D-Stream uses a multi-resolution approach and
its quality depends on granularity of a lowest level structure.
On the other hand FlockStream is a bio-inspired algorithm
which makes use of independent working agents which form
the cluster simultaneously. These algorithms work quiet well
in their own range but they are unable to handle multi-density
data. A comparison of various algorithms shows that
algorithms either have data stream support but do not have
multi-density support or have multi-density support but are not
data stream compatible.
In the proposed algorithm, a new terminology is
introduced i.e. mini core distance (mcd), which is a minimum
threshold value for capturing the different density clusters.
Basically multiple small clusters are formed on basis of mcd
and they group together to make a multi density cluster. The
algorithm also assigns data weight points to each data which is
initialized with 1 and decreases overtime. These weight points
sum up to calculate the grid weight which helps finding out
the overall grid density. The online part of MuDi algorithm
reads data stream and passes it over to core mini cluster or
maps it to grid using a helping algorithm called Merge.
Meanwhile another helping algorithm named Pruning removes
the outliers periodically and recalculates the grid weightage. In
the offline component of the algorithm, an extended form of
DBSCAN algorithm fetches the results from mini clusters.
In the end, some experimental studies are conducted to
show the results of newly proposed algorithm. The
implementation is developed in Java and the results are
compared with DenStream algorithm for comparison. Two
synthetic datasets having 5000 and 10000 data points
respectively were used. Each data set had multiple arbitrary
and multi-density shaped clusters. When it comes to cluster
purity, both algorithms show similar results in case of single
density clusters but when the multi density clusters are passed
the quality and purity of DenStream decreases significantly.
MuDi was not only able to identify all clusters but also the
time taken was less than DenStream. Also MuDi Stream is
insensitive to data noise which makes it more efficient and
reliable.
L. PGDC-Stream
Hu et al. in [12] points out that existing data clustering
algorithms are not capable of processing high-dimensional
data streams. To be specific, they are not able to find arbitrary
shaped clusters and also cannot remove noise points timely.
Proposed algorithm uses the map-Reduce technique which is
based on HADOOP platform, which is widely used for
processing large scale static data.
The basic idea of Map-reduce pattern is that it generates
key-value pairs of data. Here the value part of same key-value
pair can be merged using a reduce function. This mechanism
allows algorithm to process large amount of data as well as
distribute it among thousands of machines for parallel
processing. The map-reduce process is done in 3 phases.
57
Output of each phase is used as input of the next one. This
technique makes the clustering process very efficient. Instead
of scanning all grid cells, the map-reduce function parallel
processes the data smartly and reduces calculations on each
step to get improve results.
When implementing this technique to data streams, few
things are very important. First, the proper system of
inspection cycle must be in place. If the data is coming on
regular basis at s[parse grid unit, with the increase in density,
it evolves into dense grid. However if data is not coming
frequently, it will make a dense grid sparse overtime. So an
inspection cycle circle at right interval will ensure the quality
of the dense grid remains intact. Other thing to look for is to
formulate an appropriate density threshold function. This
function removes the noise points from data to ensure that the
cluster results are not affected. Online component of PGDC-
Stream algorithm is responsible for taking data from stream
and mapping it to grid. The offline component continuously
inspects and removes sparse grid units which are formed by
noise points.
Experimental studies involved in this algorithm included
data set of length 100000, having 2 dimensions and data
stream rate at 1000 points/s. results were compared with
CluStream and found that the performance was much better.
The PGDC algorithm was able to detect noise points timely
and also arbitrary shaped clusters were formed. The resource
release rate was also very high. In scalability test the cluster
quality, purity and scalability was found to be better than
CluStream. Because unlike CluStream, PGDC does not need
to do complex computations for distance calculation, it just
has to map continuously arriving data to the relevant grid. In
the end it is pointed out that this algorithm may have some
drawbacks as if the order of the stream is changed the results
could be different, since it’s a preliminary research so there is
room for improvement.
III. CRITICAL EVALUATION
The purpose of this section is to compare all the above
discussed algorithms and try to find out their weaknesses and
strengths; and figure out that in which scenario which
algorithm is most suitable. Although all of the discussed
algorithms perform clustering on data streams and all of them
also make use of the density measure, however the
circumstances they operate in are different. The problems they
target and the enhancements they offer are also different. So in
our opinion, grading any algorithm lower than any other
algorithm, based on above criteria is not fair. However, we can
evaluate the algorithms on basis of their targeted problems and
the amount of enhancements they offer.
 Table I represents some common attributes of each
algorithm and can be compared with other peers. The
attributes like objective, environment, tool used, etc. are
ignorable as these attributes does not impact on the evaluation
because we are not imposing any platform or tool dependency.
However other attributes such as dataset, number of clusters,
number of attributes or dimensions, total data points, stream
speed, etc. are very important. Our thoughts on each of these
attributes are as follows:
Dataset: Most of the algorithms used KDD CUP99 dataset,
which is a real time dataset based on intrusion detection data
points. Some algorithms also used synthetic datasets along
with KDD CUP99. Few algorithms [8], [11] and [12] only
used synthetic datasets but we recommend the use of both
synthetic and real-time datasets; however the results can be
improved if multiple real time datasets are used.
Clusters: a maximum of 10 clusters [6] and 80 micro-
clusters [7] is used. Few algorithms did not mention the
number of clusters and rest used very few clusters. In our
opinion to proper test the results the number of clusters should
be increased because in real data streams the number of
clusters could be very high.
Attributes/Dimensions: Most of the algorithms used a
decent number of attributes/dimensions (30-50) which can
help in in-depth clustering.
Data Points: this is a very important attribute in stream
clustering. Since the streams normally consists of huge
volume of data points so it is recommended to use very large
number of data points in order to get a real time feel.
Generally algorithms have used 100k-200k data points which
are not enough. We recommend using at least 2 million data
points, however keeping in mind the limited availability of
large datasets; it is very difficult to obtain real time large
datasets.
Stream Speed/sec: Stream speed is another important
attribute to consider. It represents the data points coming per
second. Maximum stream speed used by [4], [7] and [11] is
2000 data points per second. It is decent speed but in real time,
depending upon stream source, can be extremely higher than
2000 so we need algorithms which can perform better in high
stream speed as well.
Table II depicts the claimed contributions of each
algorithm. There are two sections of the table problems
addressed and performance enhancements. Red cells show if
an algorithm does not have that feature and green cell shows if
they claim to have that feature. We have not verified the
58
claims made by each algorithm; we made assumption that the
experimental results they provide are valid.
Problem addressed shows which problems each algorithm
targeted. As Table II shows, most common problem addressed
by algorithms are identifying arbitrary shaped clusters, finding
arbitrary density clusters, noise point handling and
dependency on prior clustering knowledge. These are also few
of the main challenges in data stream clustering so we expect
that each data stream clustering algorithm must address these
problems even if their main research problem is different.
Section II shows how many performance enhancements are
claimed by each algorithm. These claims are extracted from
the experimental results sections. The experiment results of
each algorithm are compared with their predecessor. Most
common enhancements are time efficiency, cluster purity,
clustering quality/accuracy, efficient memory consumption
and algorithm scalability. All of these features are very
important for success of a data stream algorithm; however
time and memory efficiency are 2 most important aspects
since these are biggest challenges in stream clustering.
Another useful feature is algorithm scalability which
almost all of the algorithms claim to provide. It means that the
algorithm maintains its performance and keeps on yielding
accurate results even when the measures like cluster count,
data size, stream speed, etc. are increased. An algorithm which
shows improved performance in only a static environment is
most likely tend to fail when it is overloaded with input
parameters.
If we summarize the evaluation of all algorithms then in
our opinion PKS-Stream-1 [10] is a good example of efficient
data stream clustering algorithms. One reason is that it not just
uses the gird-based structure and density values but also
utilizes the Pks-tree structure. It plots data points into Pks-tree
and then assigns those trees to grid cells. This way the
clustering is done more efficiently. Another reason of
declaring PKS-Stream-1 better is because it addresses most
number of problems and also offers most number of
performance enhancements.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, we have reviewed various density-based
clustering algorithms for data streams. These algorithms are
grid-based where data points are plotted on grids and
processed in a systematic way. The density values associated
to each data point helps distinguishing between dense and
sparse grids. According to our understanding, grid-based
structure enables algorithm to overcome shortcomings of
legacy partition-based algorithms which were not suitable for
data streams. The use of density further improves clustering
 TABLE I. SUMMARY OF DENSITY-BASED ALGORITHMS
Algorithm Year Objective Environment Tool Dataset Cluste Attributes\ Data Stream
Used rs Dimensions Points Speed/sec

Active Grid Intel Pentium

AGD-Stream MATL KDD
2010 Density based 4, Windows 5 42 30k
[1] AB CUP-99
clustering XP

Subspace
Intel Pentium
SDSStream Clustering over Visual KDD
2010 4, Windows 41 300k
[2] Weighted C++ CUP-99
XP
Sliding Window

KDD
Arbitrary shape CUP-99
MDStream
2011 and density C++ and 50 200k
[3]
clustering Synthetic
datasets

Real time stream 3

DDBound
2011 boundary Benchmar 4 2.47m 2000
[4]
detection k datasets

Grid and
GRDCLuStream
2012 Relative Density
[5]
based Clustering

Shuttle
Resource aware Android dataset
RA-DCluster
2012 clustering in Emulator, Eclipse (real) and 10 9 243k 100
[6]
mobile devices Windows XP synthetic
dataset

Projected
KDD
HDDStream clustering over 80
2012 Java CUP-99, 34 1m 2000
[7] high dimension (micro)
UCI KDD
data stream

Modified Behavior change

8 Numeric
DenStream 2012 detection in data 4-7 2 8
datasets
[8] streams
Forest
Covertype
Pentium 4,
DCUStream Uncertain data MATL dataset
2012 Windows 40 1.1m
[9] stream clustering AB (real) and
2003
synthetic
dataset
Density grid Visual
PKS-Stream-1 KDD
2012 based stream Intel Core i3 Studio 41 300k 1550
[10] CUP-99
clustering 2010

Multi density
2
MuDi Stream clustering for
2013 Mac OS X Java synthetic 15k 2000
[11] noisy data
datasets
streams

PGDC Stream Parallel data Intel Premium HADO Synthetic

2015 2 100k 1000
[12] stream clustering D, Ubuntu OP dataset

59
 TABLE II. COMPARISON OF DENSITY-BASED CLUSTERING ALGORITHMS
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12]
No arbitrary shaped clusters ● ● ● ● ●
No boundary point detection ●
No arbitrary densities in clusters ● ●
Problems Addressed

No outlier/noise handling ● ● ● ● ●
No selection of clustering result sensitivity ● ●
Dependency on prior cluster knowledge ● ● ● ●
Clustering process redundancy ● ●
Projected clustering in disjoint ●
Concept drift detection ●
No multi-density support ● ●
Time Efficiency ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Performance Enhancements

Clustering Accuracy ● ● ●
Cluster Quality/Purity ● ● ● ● ● ●
Memory Consumption ● ● ● ●
Accurate boundary detection ●
Concept/Behavioral change detection ●
Clustering Entropy ●
Battery Consumption ●
Scalability ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Relative Density ●

results and makes the clustering fast and reliable. We analyzed
what problems and challenges are there in data stream
clustering and how these proposed algorithms have solved
those problems. Following major challenges every researcher
has to face in this domain:
Memory Constraint: Due to the immensely huge size of data
streams memory is the biggest limitation. It is physically
impossible to store all the data in memory which makes it
tricky to perform any kind of clustering on it. The solution for
this limitation is to get a chunk of data in a given time window
and perform clustering on it. This data is then released to free
memory and the next chunk of data is fetched to move forward.
Time Constraint: another limitation of data stream clustering is
time. The stream is very fast and the continuously flowing data
does not wait for being processed. We not only have to perform
clustering in limited time but also prepare our system to receive
new data which keeps on coming without any interruption. The
only solution to this problem is to improve the efficiency and
response time of our algorithm to handle fast-paced data.
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