Space: Apache Mahout (https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT)
Page: Top Down Clustering
(https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/MAHOUT/Top+Down+Clustering)
Edited by Paritosh Ranjan:
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Top Down Clustering
Top Down clustering is a type of Hierarchical Clustering. It tries to find
bigger clusters first and then does fine grained clustering on these clusters.
Hence the name Top Down.
Any clustering algorithm can be used to perform the Top Level Clustering (
finding bigger clusters ) and the Bottom Level Clustering ( fine grained
clustering on each of the top level clusters). So, all clustering algorithms
available in Mahout, other than the MinHash Clustering algorithm ( which is a
"Bottom Up" Clustering Algorithm ), are suitable to be used for Top Down
Clustering, on both Top Level and Bottom Level.
The top level clustering output needs to be post processed in order to identify
all top level clusters and, to group vectors into their respective top level
clusters. So, that, the bottom level clustering can execute on each of them.
The first step to execute the top down clustering, would be to run any
clustering algorithm of your choice, preferably with clustering parameters
which will produce bigger clusters. This would be the top level clustering.
Then, the output of this clustering should be post processed, to group them
into respective top level clusters. This can be done using
*ClusterOutputPostProcessorDriver.*
*{+}Working{+}*
When any clustering algorithm runs, the output path stores data in two
directories
*clusteredPoints*
*clusters-0-final*
The clusteredPoints directory contains information in the form of
_(clusterId,_ *{_}vector)_{*}*.*
The clusters-*-final directory will hold the cluster centroids.
Now, to further run clustering on the clusters found, the vectors belonging to
different clusters needs to be stored in separate directories. This can be done
using the *ClusterOutputPostProcessorDriver* as explained in the *{_}Usage{_}*
section*.\*
*ClusterOutputPostProcessorDriver* will need this output path as the input, and
it will segregate it into separate clusters.
So, after post processing, if you will check the output path provided to the
*ClusterOutputPostProcessorDriver,* you will find directories with names as
clusterId, i.e. 0,1,2,...,20,21,22,23,24.25....
All these directories will store files containing the vectors for that
particular cluster. Now, all of these directories can be provided as input to
the bottom level clustering algorithm one by one. The bottom level clustering
algorithm can then, cluster all the top level clusters as per the algorithm
used.
*{+}Usage{+}*
*ClusterOutputPostProcessorDriver* has a run method
*run(Path input, Path output, boolean runSequential)*
The input parameter provided to run method is, _"the output path provided to
the clustering algorithm"_, which would be post processed. It is the path of
the directory containing clusters-*-final and clusteredPoints.
The output parameter provided to run method is _"the path where the post
processed data would be stored"_.
The runSequential parameter provided to run method is _"If set to true, post
processes it sequentially, else, uses, MapReduce to do it"_. Hint : If the
clustering was done sequentially, make it sequential, else vice versa.
!Top Down Clustering.jpg|align=center,border=1!
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