DBSCAN on Resilient Distributed Datasets

Abstract

DBSCAN is a well-known density-based data clustering algorithm that is widely used due to its ability to find arbitrarily shaped clusters in noisy data. However, DBSCAN is hard to scale which limits its utility when working with large data sets. Resilient Distributed Datasets (RDDs), on the other hand, are a fast data-processing abstraction created explicitly for in-memory computation of large data sets. This paper presents a new algorithm based on DBSCAN using the Resilient Distributed Datasets approach: RDD-DBSCAN. RDD-DBSCAN overcomes the scalability limitations of the traditional DBSCAN algorithm by operating in a fully distributed fashion. The paper also evaluates an implementation of RDD-DBSCAN using Apache Spark, the official RDD implementation.