Parallel and Hierarchical Mode Association Clustering with an R Package <i>Modalclust</i>

Abstract

Modalclust is an R package which performs Hierarchical Mode Association Clustering (HMAC) along with its parallel implementation over several processors. Modal clustering techniques are especially designed to efficiently extract clusters in high dimensions with arbitrary density shapes. Further, clustering is performed over several resolutions and the results are summarized as a hierarchical tree, thus providing a model based multi resolution cluster analysis. Finally we implement a novel parallel implementation of HMAC which performs the clustering job over several processors thereby dramatically increasing the speed of clustering procedure especially for large data sets. This package also provides a number of functions for visualizing clusters in high dimensions, which can also be used with other clustering softwares.