Forest Fire Clustering: Cluster-oriented Label Propagation Clustering and Monte Carlo Verification Inspired by Forest Fire Dynamics

Clustering methods group data points together and assign them group-level labels. However, it has been difficult to evaluate the confidence of the clustering results. Here, we introduce a novel method that could not only find robust clusters but also provide a confidence score for the labels of each data point. Specifically, we reformulated label-propagation clustering to model after forest fire dynamics. The method has only one parameter - a fire temperature term describing how easily one label propagates from one node to the next. Through iteratively starting label propagations through a graph, we can discover the number of clusters in a dataset with minimum prior assumptions. Further, we can validate our predictions and uncover the posterior probability distribution of the labels using Monte Carlo simulations. Lastly, our iterative method is inductive and does not need to be retrained with the arrival of new data. Here, we describe the method and provide a summary of how the method performs against common clustering benchmarks.