A Divide-and-Conquer Approach for Minimum Spanning Tree-Based Clustering

Due to their ability to detect clusters with irregular boundaries, minimum spanning tree-based clustering algorithms have been widely used in practice. However, in such clustering algorithms, the search for nearest neighbor in the construction of minimum spanning trees is the main source of computation and the standard solutions take O(N²) time. In this paper, we present a fast minimum spanning tree-inspired clustering algorithm, which, by using an efficient implementation of the cut and the cycle property of the minimum spanning trees, can have much better performance than O(N²).