Bipartite Graphs for Monitoring Clusters Transitions

Abstract

The study of evolution has become an important research issue, especially in the last decade, due to a greater awareness of our world's volatility. As a consequence, a new paradigm has emerged to respond more effectively to a class of new problems in Data Mining. In this paper we address the problem of monitoring the evolution of clusters and propose the MClusT framework, which was developed along the lines of this new Change Mining paradigm. MClusT includes a taxonomy of transitions, a tracking method based in Graph Theory, and a transition detection algorithm. To demonstrate its feasibility and applicability we present real world case studies, using datasets extracted from Banco de Portugal and the Portuguese Institute of Statistics. We also test our approach in a benchmark dataset from TSDL. The results are encouraging and demonstrate the ability of MClusT framework to provide an efficient diagnosis of clusters transitions