Fast kNN mode seeking clustering applied to active learning

A significantly faster algorithm is presented for the original kNN mode seeking procedure. It has the advantages over the well-known mean shift algorithm that it is feasible in high-dimensional vector spaces and results in uniquely, well defined modes. Moreover, without any additional computational effort it may yield a multi-scale hierarchy of clusterings. The time complexity is just O(n^1.5). resulting computing times range from seconds for 10^4 objects to minutes for 10^5 objects and to less than an hour for 10^6 objects. The space complexity is just O(n). The procedure is well suited for finding large sets of small clusters and is thereby a candidate to analyze thousands of clusters in millions of objects. The kNN mode seeking procedure can be used for active learning by assigning the clusters to the class of the modal objects of the clusters. Its feasibility is shown by some examples with up to 1.5 million handwritten digits. The obtained classification results based on the clusterings are compared with those obtained by the nearest neighbor rule and the support vector classifier based on the same labeled objects for training. It can be concluded that using the clustering structure for classification can be significantly better than using the trained classifiers. A drawback of using the clustering for classification, however, is that no classifier is obtained that may be used for out-of-sample objects.