k-Medoids Clustering in Rust with FasterPAM

This Rust crate implements k-medoids clustering with PAM. It can be used with arbitrary dissimilarites, as it requires a dissimilarity matrix as input.

For further details on the implemented algorithm FasterPAM, see:

Erich Schubert, Peter J. Rousseeuw
Fast and Eager k-Medoids Clustering:
O(k) Runtime Improvement of the PAM, CLARA, and CLARANS Algorithms
Information Systems (101), 2021, 101804
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2021.101804 (open access)

an earlier (slower, and now obsolete) version was published as:

Erich Schubert, Peter J. Rousseeuw:
Faster k-Medoids Clustering: Improving the PAM, CLARA, and CLARANS Algorithms
In: 12th International Conference on Similarity Search and Applications (SISAP 2019), 171-187.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32047-8_16
Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.05691

This is a port of the original Java code from ELKI to Rust.

If you use this code in scientific work, please cite above papers. Thank you.

Example

let dissim = ndarray::arr2(&[[0,1,2,3],[1,0,4,5],[2,4,0,6],[3,5,6,0]]);
let mut meds = kmedoids::random_initialization(4, 2, &mut rand::thread_rng());
let (loss, assingment, n_iter, n_swap): (f64, _, _, _) = kmedoids::fasterpam(&dissim, &mut meds, 100);
println!("Loss is: {}", loss);

Note that:

• you need to specify the "output" data type of loss -- chose a signed type with sufficient precision. For example for unsigned distances using u32, it may be better to use i64 to compute the loss.
• the input distance type needs to be convertible into the output data type via Into

Implemented Algorithms

• FasterPAM (Schubert and Rousseeuw, 2020, 2021)
• FasterPAM with an integrated additional shuffling step
• FastPAM1 (Schubert and Rousseeuw, 2019, 2021)
• PAM (Kaufman and Rousseeuw, 1987) with BUILD and SWAP
• Alternating optimization (k-means-style algorithm)
• Silhouette index for evaluation (Rousseeuw, 1987)

Note that the k-means-like algorithm for k-medoids tends to find much worse solutions.

Rust Dependencies

• num-traits for supporting different numeric types
• ndarray for arrays (optional)
• rand for random initialization (optional)

License: GPL-3 or later

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

FAQ: Why GPL and not Apache/MIT/BSD?

Because copyleft software like Linux is what built the open-source community.

Tit for tat: you get to use my code, I get to use your code.