A Clustering Algorithm via Density Perception and Hierarchical Aggregation Based on Urban Multimodal Big Data for Identifying and Analyzing Categories of Poverty-Stricken Households in China

Nowadays, urban multimodal big data are freely available to the public due to the growing number of cities, which plays a critical role in many fields such as transportation, education, medical treatment, and land resource management. The successful completion of poverty-relief work can greatly improve the quality of people’s life and ensure the sustainable development of the society. Poverty is a severe challenge for human society. It is of great significance to apply machine learning to mine different categories of poverty-stricken households and further provide decision support for poverty alleviation. Traditional poverty alleviation methods need to consume a lot of manpower, material resources, and financial resources. Based on the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), this paper designs the hierarchical DBSCAN clustering algorithm to identify and analyze the categories of poverty-stricken households in China. First, the proposed method adjusts the neighborhood radius dynamically for dividing the data space into several initial clusters with different densities. Then, neighbor clusters are identified by the border and inner distances constantly and aggregated recursively to form new clusters. Based on the idea of division and aggregation, the proposed method can recognize clusters of different forms and deal with noises effectively in the data space with imbalanced density distribution. The experiments indicate that the method has the ideal performance of clustering, which identifies the commonness and difference in characteristics of poverty-stricken households reasonably. In terms of the specific indicator “Accuracy,” the accuracy increases by 2.3% compared with other methods.