Linear manifold clustering for high dimensional data based on line manifold searching and fusing

High dimensional data clustering, with the inherent sparsity of data and the existence of noise, is a serious challenge for clustering algorithms. A new linear manifold clustering method was proposed to address this problem. The basic idea was to search the line manifold clusters hidden in datasets, and then fuse some of the line manifold clusters to construct higher dimensional manifold clusters. The orthogonal distance and the tangent distance were considered together as the linear manifold distance metrics. Spatial neighbor information was fully utilized to construct the original line manifold and optimize line manifolds during the line manifold cluster searching procedure. The results obtained from experiments over real and synthetic data sets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over some competing clustering methods in terms of accuracy and computation time. The proposed method is able to obtain high clustering accuracy for various data sets with different sizes, manifold dimensions and noise ratios, which confirms the anti-noise capability and high clustering accuracy of the proposed method for high dimensional data.