Abstract Visual Assessment of cluster Tendency (VAT) is a popular method that visually represents the possible clusters found in a dataset as dark blocks along the diagonal of a reordered dissimilarity image (RDI). Although many variants of the VAT algorithm have been proposed to improve the visualisation quality on different types of datasets, they still suffer from the challenge of extracting clusters with varied densities. In this paper, we focus on overcoming this drawback of VAT algorithms by incorporating kernel methods and also propose a novel adaptive cluster extraction strategy, named CER, to effectively identify the local clusters from the RDI. We examine their effects on an improved VAT method (iVAT) and systematically evaluate the clustering performance on 18 synthetic and real-world datasets. The experimental results reveal that the recently proposed data-dependent dissimilarity measure, namely the Isolation kernel, helps to significantly improve the RDI image for easy cluster identification. Furthermore, the proposed cluster extraction method, CER, outperforms other existing methods on most of the datasets in terms of a series of dissimilarity measures.

First developed to rank website relevance, PageRank has become ubiquitous in many areas of graph machine learning including deep learning. We demonstrate that a number of recently published deep graph neural networks are qualitatively equivalent to shallow networks utilizing Personalized PageRank (PPR), and that their performance improvements over existing PPR implementations can be fully explained by hyperparameter choices. We also show that PPR with these hyperparameters outperform more recently published sophisticated variations of PPR-based graph neural networks, and present efficient implementations that reduce training times and memory requirements while improving scalability.

Hand gesture recognition is the process of detecting the hand movements via sensor measurements for detecting an activity, such as writing a letter or a number. Recognising the handwritten characters using wearable devices enables machine-human interaction to occur without the need for a communication method. An intelligent automated framework is required to accurately detect the handwritten characters using wrist worn sensor signals, in particular, with minimal number of sensors. Moreover, the system developed needs to have the capacity to recognise the characters written in different sizes. In order to address these, we analyse performance of several machine learning models using single/multiple sensors namely, accelerometer or/and gyroscope, for recognising hand gesture characters including alphabet and numbers of varying sizes. We formulate a set of features that enable robust and accurate detection of the characters.We performed novel data collection using an off-the-shelf wrist-worn sensor based device, and evaluated our framework to detect the different characters effectively. The maximum accuracy (90.40%) was achieved using both sensors and Random Forest (RF) model. This was dropped to 82.51% for the same model using accelerometer sensor alone. Using the gyroscope sensor, an overall average accuracy of 80.16% was achieved with the Forward Neural Network (FNN) model. Although the model based on both sensors showed the best performance, our evaluation reveals that it is feasible to develop a machine learning model using single sensor to detect hand gesture characters of varying sizes with reasonable (≥ 80%) accuracy.

To provide effective services for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), such as optimizing ride services and recommending trips, it is important to predict the distributions of passenger flows from various origins to destinations. However, existing crowd flow prediction models have not sufficiently addressed this problem, and most methods have only focused on in and out flows of individual regions. The main challenges of origin-destination (OD) crowd flow prediction are diverse flow patterns across city networks and data sparsity. To solve these problems, we propose a Multi Attention 3D Residual Network (MAThR) to predict city-wide OD crowd flows. In particular, we develop a multi-component 3D residual structure with a novel global self-attention mechanism to dynamically aggregate the OD spatial-temporal dependencies, by modeling three components: contextual information of the region, and long and short term periodic crowd flows. For each component, we design a tensor criss-cross self-attention block, which can simultaneously discover the global and local correlation of spatial (where), temporal (when) and contextual (which) information between all OD pairs. Evaluation on real-world crowd flow data demonstrates the advantages of our MAThR method on prediction accuracy, compared to other existing state-of-the-art methods.

Clustering large volumes of high-dimensional data is a challenging task. Many clustering algorithms have been developed to address either handling datasets with a very large sample size or with a very high number of dimensions, but they are often impractical when the data is large in both aspects. To simultaneously overcome both the `curse of dimensionality' problem due to high dimensions and scalability problems due to large sample size, we propose a new fast clustering algorithm called FensiVAT. FensiVAT is a hybrid, ensemble-based clustering algorithm which uses fast data-space reduction and an intelligent sampling strategy. In addition to clustering, FensiVAT also provides visual evidence that is used to estimate the number of clusters (cluster tendency assessment) in the data. In our experiments, we compare FensiVAT with nine state-of-the-art approaches which are popular for large sample size or high-dimensional data clustering. Experimental results suggest that FensiVAT, which can cluster large volumes of high-dimensional datasets in a few seconds, is the fastest and most accurate method of the ones tested.

Subspace clustering aims to find groups of similar objects (clusters) that exist in lower dimensional subspaces from a high dimensional dataset. It has a wide range of applications, such as analysing high dimensional sensor data or DNA sequences. However, existing algorithms have limitations in finding clusters in non-disjoint subspaces and scaling to large data, which impinge their applicability in areas such as bioinformatics and the Internet of Things. We aim to address such limitations by proposing a subspace clustering algorithm using a bottom-up strategy. Our algorithm first searches for base clusters in low dimensional subspaces. It then forms clusters in higher-dimensional subspaces using these base clusters, which we formulate as a frequent pattern mining problem. This formulation enables efficient search for clusters in higher-dimensional subspaces, which is done using FP-trees. The proposed algorithm is evaluated against traditional bottom-up clustering algorithms and state-of-the-art subspace clustering algorithms. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm produces clusters with high accuracy, and scales well to large volumes of data. We also demonstrate the algorithm's performance using real-life ten genomic datasets.

Identifying unusual or anomalous patterns in an underlying dataset is an important but challenging task in many applications. The focus of the unsupervised anomaly detection literature has mostly been on vectorised data. However, many applications are more naturally described using higher-order tensor representations. Approaches that vectorise tensorial data can destroy the structural information encoded in the high-dimensional space, and lead to the problem of the curse of dimensionality. In this paper we present the first unsupervised tensorial anomaly detection method, along with a randomised version of our method. Our anomaly detection method, the One-class Support Tensor Machine (1STM), is a generalisation of conventional one-class Support Vector Machines to higher-order spaces. 1STM preserves the multiway structure of tensor data, while achieving significant improvement in accuracy and efficiency over conventional vectorised methods. We then leverage the theory of nonlinear random projections to propose the Randomised 1STM (R1STM). Our empirical analysis on several real and synthetic datasets shows that our R1STM algorithm delivers comparable or better accuracy to a state-of-the-art deep learning method and traditional kernelised approaches for anomaly detection, while being approximately 100 times faster in training and testing.

The growth in pervasive network infrastructure called the Internet of Things (IoT) enables a wide range of physical objects and environments to be monitored in fine spatial and temporal detail. The detailed, dynamic data that are collected in large quantities from sensor devices provide the basis for a variety of applications. Automatic interpretation of these evolving large data is required for timely detection of interesting events. This article develops and exemplifies two new relatives of the visual assessment of tendency (VAT) and improved visual assessment of tendency (iVAT) models, which uses cluster heat maps to visualize structure in static datasets. One new model is initialized with a static VAT/iVAT image, and then incrementally (hence inc-VAT/inc-iVAT) updates the current minimal spanning tree (MST) used by VAT with an efficient edge insertion scheme. Similarly, dec-VAT/dec-iVAT efficiently removes a node from the current VAT MST. A sequence of inc-iVAT/dec-iVAT images can be used for (visual) anomaly detection in evolving data streams and for sliding window based cluster assessment for time series data. The method is illustrated with four real datasets (three of them being smart city IoT data). The evaluation demonstrates the algorithms’ ability to successfully isolate anomalies and visualize changing cluster structure in the streaming data.

Pedestrians movements have a major impact on the dynamics of cities and provide valuable guidance to city planners. In this paper we model the normal behaviours of pedestrian flows and detect anomalous events from pedestrian counting data of the City of Melbourne. Since the data spans an extended period, and pedestrian activities can change intermittently (e.g., activities in winter vs. summer), we applied an Ensemble Switching Model, which is a dynamic anomaly detection technique that can accommodate systems that switch between different states. The results are compared with those produced by a static clustering model (HyCARCE) and also cross-validated with known events. We found that the results from the Ensemble Switching Model are valid and more accurate than HyCARCE.

Recent algorithmic and computational improvements have reduced the time it takes to build a minimal spanning tree (MST) for big data sets. In this paper we compare single linkage clustering based on MSTs built with the Filter-Kruskal method to the proposed clusiVAT algorithm, which is based on sampling the data, imaging the sample to estimate the number of clusters, followed by non-iterative extension of the labels to the rest of the big data with the nearest prototype rule. Numerical experiments with both synthetic and real data confirm the theory that clusiVAT produces true single linkage clusters in compact, separated data. We also show that single linkage fails, while clusiVAT finds high quality partitions that match ground truth labels very well. And clusiVAT is fast: it recovers the preferred c = 3 Gaussian clusters in a mixture of 1 million two-dimensional data points with 100% accuracy in 3.1 seconds.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide a low cost option for gathering spatially dense data from different environments. However, WSNs have limited energy resources that hinder the dissemination of the raw data over the network to a central location. This has stimulated research into efficient data mining approaches, which can exploit the restricted computational capabilities of the sensors to model their normal behavior. Having a normal model of the network, sensors can then forward anomalous measurements to the base station. Most of the current data modeling approaches proposed for WSNs require a fixed offline training period and use batch training in contrast to the real streaming nature of data in these networks. In addition they usually work in stationary environments. In this paper we present an efficient online model construction algorithm that captures the normal behavior of the system. Our model is capable of tracking changes in the data distribution in the monitored environment. We illustrate the proposed algorithm with numerical results on both real-life and simulated data sets, which demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of our approach compared to existing methods.