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I have a dataset of longitudes and latitudes for stores in New York City. The data consists of only three columns - longitude, latitude, and store ID.

I want to use python to cluster these stores by using longitude and latitude. Of course ID is not clusterable so I will remove it from the data before clustering.

The type of clusters I want… I want clusters that are density based. If there’s a large number of stores in an area, the algorithm should recognize that. I also want the algorithm to be able to recognize outliers. Third, I don’t want the clusters to be drastically different in size. They don’t need to be the exact same of course, because density will play a part in that. But at the same time, I don’t want a cluster with 100 stores when the average number of stores in a cluster should be around 20. Lastly. I need the algorithm to recognize that this is geospatial data. I need it to cluster accordingly.

What is the best clustering algorithm to use for this geospatial data?

I know the obvious answer seems like DBSCAN. But I promise I have tried it out and have done a lot of research on tuning those parameters. However it doesn’t meet the criteria I’m looking for.

What other algorithms will be worth a try?

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    $\begingroup$ I would consider Gaussian mixtures among others. Since there are multiple density-based methods, you may wish to further qualify what you mean by "best clustering algorithm". $\endgroup$
    – Galen
    Commented Feb 10, 2022 at 23:27
  • $\begingroup$ What do you mean by "I want clusters that are density based". Density, as opposed to what? $\endgroup$
    – Vladimir Belik
    Commented Feb 10, 2022 at 23:39
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    $\begingroup$ In many data sets, your density requirement is in conflict with clusters being somewhat balanced in size. Did you plot your data and are you sure that reasonable density-based clusters will not differ much in size? $\endgroup$
    – Christian Hennig
    Commented Feb 11, 2022 at 0:09
  • $\begingroup$ pdfcluster cran.r-project.org/web/packages/pdfCluster/index.html is another method for density-based clustering. Not sure whether it exists in python though. $\endgroup$
    – Christian Hennig
    Commented Feb 11, 2022 at 0:10
  • $\begingroup$ Could you post a visualization (something like a map) of your data, or of simulated data similar to the real data you're working with? $\endgroup$
    – Adrian
    Commented Feb 11, 2022 at 0:31

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I am not very familiar with the peculiarities of geospatial data. As a result, I'm not sure what you mean when you say "I need the algorithm to recognize that this is geospatial data".

This sounds like a perfect use case of K-means clustering to me. You essentially have an XY plane, and you need to group the points together based on their literal distances to each other.

I would try K-means, and adjusting the parameters (especially the "number of clusters/means") until you're either visually satisfied, or you can take advantage of some objective measure of clustering quality like the silhouette coefficient.

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