Clustering Goes Big: CLUBS-P, an Algorithm for Unsupervised Clustering Around Centroids Tailored for Big Data Applications

The need to support advanced analytics on Big Data is driving data scientist' interest toward massively parallel distributed systems and software platforms, such as Map-Reduce and Spark, that make possible their scalable utilization. However, when complex data mining algorithms are required, their fully scalable deployment on such platforms faces a number of technical challenges that grow with the complexity of the algorithms involved. Thus algorithms, that were originally designed for a sequential nature, must often be redesigned in order to effectively use the distributed computational resources. In this paper, we explore these problems, and then propose a solution which has proven to be very effective on the complex hierarchical clustering algorithm CLUBS+. We present a parallel version of CLUBS+ named CLUBS-P with an ad-hoc implementation based on message passing: CLUBS-MP.