High‐speed rough clustering for very large document collections

Document clustering is an important tool, but it is not yet widely used in practice probably because of its high computational complexity. This article explores techniques of high‐speed rough clustering of documents, assuming that it is sometimes necessary to obtain a clustering result in a shorter time, although the result is just an approximate outline of document clusters. A promising approach for such clustering is to reduce the number of documents to be checked for generating cluster vectors in the leader–follower clustering algorithm. Based on this idea, the present article proposes a modified Crouch algorithm and incomplete single‐pass leader–follower algorithm. Also, a two‐stage grouping technique, in which the first stage attempts to decrease the number of documents to be processed in the second stage by applying a quick merging technique, is developed. An experiment using a part of the Reuters corpus RCV1 showed empirically that both the modified Crouch and the incomplete single‐pass leader–follower algorithms achieve clustering results more efficiently than the original methods, and also improved the effectiveness of clustering results. On the other hand, the two‐stage grouping technique did not reduce the processing time in this experiment.