Random Feature-Based Collaborative Kernel Fuzzy Clustering for Distributed Peer-to-Peer Networks

Kernel clustering has the ability to get the inherent nonlinear structure of the data. But the high computational complexity and the unknown representation of the kernel space make it unavailable for the data clustering in distributed peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. To solve this issue, we propose a new series of random feature-based collaborative kernel clustering algorithms in this article. In the most basic algorithm, each node in a distributed P2P network first maps its data into a low-dimensional random feature space with the approximation of the given kernel by using the random Fourier feature mapping method. Then, each node independently searches the clusters with its local data and the collaborative knowledge from its neighbor nodes, and the distributed clustering is performed among all network nodes until reaching the global consensus result, i.e., all nodes have the same cluster centers. In addition, an improved version is designed with assignment of feature weights, which is optimized by the maximum-entropy technique to extract important features for the cluster identification. What’s more, to relief the impact of different kernel functions and related parameters on clustering results, the combination of multiple kernels rather than a single kernel is adopted for the low-dimensional approximation, and the optimized weights are assigned to provide the guidance on the choice of the kernels and their parameters and discover significant features at the same time. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that the proposed methods achieve similar and even better results than the traditional kernel clustering methods on various performance metrics, including the average classification rate, the average normalized mutual information, and the average adjusted rand index. More importantly, the low-dimensional random features approximated to kernels and the distributed clustering mechanism adopted in these methods bring the greatly lower temporal complexity.