Clustering algorithms that operate on sparse data matricies [closed]

I'm trying to compile a list of clustering algorithms that are:

1. Implemented in R
2. Operate on sparse data matrices (not (dis)similarity matrices), such as those created by the sparseMatrix function.

There are several other questions on CV that discuss this concept, but none of them link to R packages that can operate directly on sparse matrices:

So far, I've found exactly one function in R that can cluster sparse matrices:

skmeans: spherical kmeans

From the skmeans package. kmeans using cosine distance. Operates on dgTMatrix objects. Provides an interface to a genetic k-means algorithm, pclust, CLUTO, gmeans, and kmndirs.

Example:

library(Matrix)
set.seed(42)

nrow <- 1000
ncol <- 10000
i <- rep(1:nrow, sample(5:100, nrow, replace=TRUE))
nnz <- length(i)
M1 <- sparseMatrix(i = i,
j = sample(ncol, nnz, replace = TRUE),
x = sample(0:1 , nnz, replace = TRUE),
dims = c(nrow, ncol))
M1 <- M1[rowSums(M1) != 0, colSums(M1) != 0]

library(skmeans)
library(cluster)
clust_sk <- skmeans(M1, 10, method='pclust', control=list(verbose=TRUE))
summary(silhouette(clust_sk))


The following algorithms get honerable mentions: they're not quite clustering algorithms, but operate on sparse matrices.

apriori: association rules mining

From the arules package. Operates on "transactions" objects, which can be coerced from ngCMatrix objects. Can be used to make recommendations.

example:

library(arules)
M1_trans <- as(as(t(M1), 'ngCMatrix'), 'transactions')
rules <- apriori(M1_trans, parameter =
list(supp = 0.01, conf = 0.01, target = "rules"))
summary(rules)


irlba: sparse SVD

From the irlba package. Does SVD on sparse matrices. Can be used to reduced the dimensionality of sparse matrices prior to clustering with traditional R packages.

example:

library(irlba)
s <- irlba(M1, nu = 0, nv=10)
M1_reduced <- as.matrix(M1 %*% s$v) clust_kmeans <- kmeans(M1, 10) summary(silhouette(clust_kmeans$cluster, dist(M1_reduced)))


apcluster: Affinity Propagation Clustering

library(apcluster)
sim <- crossprod(M1)
sim <- sim / sqrt(sim)
clust_ap <- apcluster(sim) #Takes a while


What other functions are out there?

• Do you mean sparse as in "lots of zeros" or as in "lots of missing values"? Jan 7 '14 at 14:52
• This question appears to be off-topic according to multiple criteria at stats.stackexchange.com/help/dont-ask: every answer would be equally valid, you expect more answers in addition to those provided, and there is no actual problem to be solved.
– whuber
Jan 7 '14 at 14:55
• I realise this got closed, but I've been tripping over all your questions on this as I browse SO as I had a similar problem ;) I found this library which uses affinity propensity that can work with sparse matrices: bioinf.jku.at/software/apcluster Jul 9 '15 at 11:28
• @MarkeD Thanks a lot! It's really too bad software recommendations are off-topic here, as I've found nowhere else online to ask for them.
– Zach
Jul 9 '15 at 12:56
• once again very useful question is closed :( if you dont know the answer just dont vote for close! Apr 4 '16 at 23:03

I don't use R. It is often very slow and has next to no indexing support. But software recommendations are considered off-topic anyway.

Note that plenty of algorithms don't care how you store your data. If you prefer to have a sparse matrix, that should be your choice, not the algorithms choice.

People that use too much R tend to get stuck in thinking in matrix operations (because that is the only way to write fast code in R). But that is a limited way of thinking. For example k-means: it doesn't care. In particular, it doesn't use pairwise distances at all. It just needs a way to compute the variance contribution; which is equivalent to computing the squared Euclidean distance.

Or DBSCAN. All it needs is a "neighbor" predicate. It can work with arbitrary graphs; it's just that Euclidean distance and the Epsilon threshold is the most common way of computing the neighborhood graph it uses.

P.S. Your question isn't very precise. Do you refer to sparse data matrixes or sparse similarity matrixes?

• sparse data matrixes
– Zach
Jan 6 '14 at 20:35
• Most algorithms can operate on sparse data matrixes. E.g., AGNES, PAM, DBSCAN, OPTICS, CLARA, ... Oct 11 '17 at 21:29
• Not sure why you even answered if you don't even know R. Jul 31 '19 at 16:08
• I know R. Probably even better than the average R user. I know non-standard evaluation in R and I know that most of the modules are written in C, so when you pass a sparse matrix, it is first copied into a sense matrix before passing it to the actual code. And every package uses a different way of doing so... That is not efficient. You don't choose R if you need efficiency or good integration or backwards compatibility or coordinated development. Jul 31 '19 at 17:40