Distributed data stream clustering: A fast EM-based approach

Clustering data streams has been attracting a lot of research efforts recently. However, this problem has not received enough consideration when the data streams are generated in a distributed fashion, whereas such a scenario is very common in real life applications. There exist constraining factors in clustering the data streams in the distributed environment: the data records generated are noisy or incomplete due to the unreliable distributed system; the system needs to on-line process a huge volume of data; the communication is potentially a bottleneck of the system. All these factors pose great challenge for clustering the distributed data streams. In this paper, we proposed an EM-based (Expectation Maximization) framework to effectively cluster the distributed data streams, with the above fundamental challenges in mind. In the presence of noisy or incomplete data records, our algorithms learn the distribution of underlying data streams by maximizing the likelihood of the data clusters. A test-and-cluster strategy is proposed to reduce the average processing cost, which is especially effective for online clustering over large data streams. Our extensive experimental studies show that the proposed algorithms can achieve a high accuracy with less communication cost, memory consumption and CPU time.