Awesome Clustering

Last updated 18.06.2025.

NOTE: This is an open-ended list. If you feel some method is missing or some new one is around, you are more than welcome to contribute 😄

Contents

• Awesome Clustering
  • Contents
  • Surveys
  • Theory
  • Methods
  • Estimating the number of clusters
  • Frameworks and code
  • Metrics
  • Datasets

Surveys

Year	Authors	Title	Venue	Publication Link
1999	Jain, Anil K., M. Narasimha Murty, and Patrick J. Flynn	Data clustering: a review	ACM computing surveys (CSUR)	Link
2005	Xu, Rui, and Donald Wunsch	Survey of clustering algorithms	IEEE Transactions on neural networks	Link
2013	Liu, Yanchi et al.	Understanding and enhancement of internal clustering validation measures	IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics	Link
2015	Xu, Dongkuan, and Yingjie Tian	A comprehensive survey of clustering algorithms	Annals of data science	Link
2022	Ezugwu, Absalom E., et al.	A Comprehensive Survey on Deep Clustering: Taxonomy, Challenges, and Future Directions	Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence	Link

Theory

Year	Authors	Title	Venue	Publication Link
2002	Kleinberg, Jon	An impossibility theorem for clustering	Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems	Link
2008	Ackerman and Ben-David	Measures of Clustering Quality: A Working Set of Axioms for Clustering	Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems	Link
2009	Ackerman and Ben-David	Clusterability: A Theoretical Study	International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, PMLR	Link
2017	Moseley, Benjamin and Wang, Joshua	Approximation Bounds for Hierarchical Clustering: Average Linkage, Bisecting K-means, and Local Search	Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems	Link

Methods

Year	Authors	Title	Venue	Method Abbreviation	Publication Link	Code Link
1958	RR, SOKAL. et al.	A statistical method for evaluating systematic relationships	University of Kansas Science Bulletin	HAC	Link	Code
1963	Ward Jr, Joe H.	Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function	Journal of the American statistical association	HAC	Link	Code
1967	Lance, Godfrey N., and William Thomas Williams	A general theory of classificatory sorting strategies: 1. Hierarchical systems	The computer journal	HAC	Link	Code
1970	Cheeger, Jeff.	A lower bound for the smallest eigenvalue of the Laplacian	Problems in analysis	Spectral Clustering	Link	Code
1982 (proposed in 1957)	Lloyd, Stuart	Least squares quantization in PCM	IEEE transactions on information theory	k-means	Link	Code
1996	Ester, Martin, et al.	Density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise	Int. Conf. knowledge discovery and data mining	DBSCAN	Link	Code
2001	Ng, Andrew, Michael Jordan, and Yair Weiss	On spectral clustering: Analysis and an algorithm	Advances in neural information processing systems	Spectral Clustering	Link	Code
2006	Arthur, David, and Sergei Vassilvitskii	k-means++: The advantages of careful seeding	arXiv preprint	k-means++	Link	Code (with init="k-means++")
2013	Campello, Ricardo JGB, Davoud Moulavi, and Jörg Sander	Density-based clustering based on hierarchical density estimates	Pacific-Asia conference on knowledge discovery and data mining	HDBSCAN	Link	Code
2013	Elhamifar, Ehsan, and René Vidal	Sparse subspace clustering: Algorithm, theory, and applications	IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence	SSC	Link	Code
2019	Sarfraz, Saquib, Vivek Sharma, and Rainer Stiefelhagen	Efficient parameter-free clustering using first neighbor relations	Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition	FINCH	Link	Code
2021	Sarfraz, Saquib, et al.	Temporally-weighted hierarchical clustering for unsupervised action segmentation	Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition	TW-FINCH	Link	Code
2022	Ronen, Meitar, Shahaf E. Finder, and Oren Freifeld	Deepdpm: Deep clustering with an unknown number of clusters	Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition	DeepDPM	Link	Code

Estimating the number of clusters

Year	Authors	Title	Venue	Method	Publication Link	Code Link
1953	Thorndike, Robert L.	Who belongs in the family?	Psychometrika	Elbow	Link
1976	Hubert and Levin	A General Statistical Framework for Assessing Categorical Clustering in Free Recall	Psychological Bulletin	C Index	[Paper]	[Code]
1991	Xie and Beni	A validity measure for fuzzy clustering	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	Xie and Beni Index	[Paper]	[Code]
2001	Tibshirani, Robert, Guenther Walther, and Trevor Hastie	Estimating the number of clusters in a data set via the gap statistic	Journal of the royal statistical society	GAP	Link	Code

Frameworks and code

Name	Language	Methods	Documentation	Code
scikit-learn	python	k-means, k-means++, dbscan, hdbscan, spectral and more	Docs	Code
pyclustering	python	k-means, x-means birch, bsas, and more	Docs	Code (no more maintenance)
ClusterPy	python	Many partition-based, density-based, and hierarchical clustering algorithms	Docs	Code
PyIVM	python	Internal clustering validation measures	Docs	Code

Metrics

Year	Authors	Title	Venue	Name	Optimality	Requires Ground Truth
1971	Rand	Objective Criteria for the evaluation of Clustering methods [Paper] [Code]	Journal of the American Statistical Association	Rand Index (RI)	↑	✅
1973	Dunn	Well-Separated Clusters and Optimal Fuzzy Partitions [Paper] [Code]	Journal Paper	Dunn Index	↑	❌
1974	Calinski & Harabasz	A Dendrite Method for Cluster Analysis [Paper][Code]	Biometrics	Calinski-Harabasz Index	↑	❌
1976	Hubert and Levin	A General Statistical Framework for Assessing Categorical Clustering in Free Recall [Paper][Code]	Psychological Bulletin	C Index	↓	❌
1979	Davies and Bouldin	A Cluster Separation Measure [Paper][Code]	-	Davies-Bouldin score	↓	❌
1983	Fowlkes and Mallows	A method for comparing two hierarchical clusterings [Paper] [Code]	Journal of the American Statistical Association	Fowlkes-Mallows Index (FMI)	↑	✅
1985	Hubert & Arabie	Comparing Partitions [Paper][Code]	Journal of Classification	Adjusted Rand Index (ARI)	↑	✅
1987	Rousseeuw	Silhouettes: A graphical aid to the interpretation and validation of cluster analysis [Paper][Code]	Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics	Silhouette Coefficient	↓	❌
1991	Xie and Beni	A validity measure for fuzzy clustering [Paper] [Code]	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	Xie and Beni Index	↓	❌
2000	van Dongen	Performance criteria for graph clustering and Markov cluster experiments. [Paper][Code]	Technical Report INS-R0012	Split-join distance	↓	✅
2001	Tibshirani, Walther, and Hastie	Estimating the number of clusters in a data set via the gap statistic [Paper] [Code]	Journal of the royal statistical society	GAP	↓	❌
2003	Meila	Comparing Clusterings by the Variation of Information [Paper][Code]	Learning Theory and Kernel Machine	Variation of Information (VI)	↓	✅
2007	Rosenberg and Hirschberg	V-Measure: A conditional entropy-based external cluster evaluation measure [Paper][Code]	Computational Statistics Handbook	V-Measure	↑	✅
2010	Vinh, Epps, and Bailey	[Paper] [Code]	JMLR	Adjusted Mutual Information (AMI)	↓	✅
2013	Wu, Junjiw et al.	Adapting the Right Measures for K-means Clustering [Paper]	KDD	Normalized external validation measures	Depends on the measure	✅
2025	Jeon, Hyeon et al.	Measuring the Validity of Clustering Validation Datasets [Paper] [Code]	TPAMI	Adjusted Internal Valdiation Measures	↑	❌
-	-	[Code]	-	Normalized Mutual Information (NMI)	↑	✅
-	-	[Code]	-	Purity	↑	✅
-	-	[Code]	-	Sum of Squared Error Index (SSEI)	↓	✅
-	-	[Code]	-	Jaccard Index (IoU)	↑	✅
-	-	[Code]	-	Cross Entropy	↓	✅
-	Hartigan	[Code]	-	Hartigan Index	↓	❌

Datasets

Year	Authors	Title	Venue	Name	Data type	Publication Link	Dataset Link
1996	Sameer A Nene, Shree K Nayar, Hiroshi Murase, et al.	Columbia object image library	Technical Report, Department of Computer Science, Columbia University	COIL-20	Images	Link	Dataset
1998	Y. LeCun, L. Bottou, Y. Bengio, and P. Haffner	Gradient-based learning applied to document recognition	Proc. IEEE	MNIST	Images	Link	Dataset
2009	Alex Krizhevsky, Geoffrey Hinton, et al.	Learning multiple layers of features from tiny image	Technical Report, University of Toronto	CIFAR-10	Images	Link	Dataset (or directly from torchvision)
2009	Alex Krizhevsky, Geoffrey Hinton, et al.	Learning multiple layers of features from tiny image	Technical Report, University of Toronto	CIFAR-100	Images	Link	Dataset (or directly from torchvision)
2009	Jia Deng, Wei Dong, Richard Socher, Li-Jia Li, Kai Li, and Li Fei-Fei.	Imagenet: A large-scale hierarchical image database	IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition	ImageNet	Images	Link	Dataset
2013	Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, Kai Chen, Greg S Corrado, and Jeff Dean	Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality	Advances in neural information processing systems	Google News	Word embeddings	Link	Dataset
2013	Martin Bäuml, Makarand Tapaswi, and Rainer Stiefelhagen	Semi-supervised Learning with Constraints for Person Identification in Multimedia Data	CVPR	BBT	Images	Link
2013	Martin Bäuml, Makarand Tapaswi, and Rainer Stiefelhagen	Semi-supervised Learning with Constraints for Person Identification in Multimedia Data	CVPR	Buffy	Images	Link
2014	Pierre Baldi, Peter Sadowski, and Daniel Whiteson	Searching for exotic particles in high-energy physics with deep learning	Nature communications	HIGGS	Tabular - Physics features	Link	Dataset
2017	Han Xiao, Kashif Rasul, and Roland Vollgraf	Fashion-mnist: a novel image dataset for benchmarking machine learning algorithms	arXiv Preprint	FMNIST	Images	Link	Dataset (or directly from torchvision)