Mixed Data Clustering Survey and Challenges
This addresses the problem of handling heterogeneous data for industries dealing with big data, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing pretopological methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of clustering mixed data types by introducing a method based on pretopological spaces, benchmarking it against classical and existing pretopological approaches to evaluate performance.
The advent of the big data paradigm has transformed how industries manage and analyze information, ushering in an era of unprecedented data volume, velocity, and variety. Within this landscape, mixed-data clustering has become a critical challenge, requiring innovative methods that can effectively exploit heterogeneous data types, including numerical and categorical variables. Traditional clustering techniques, typically designed for homogeneous datasets, often struggle to capture the additional complexity introduced by mixed data, underscoring the need for approaches specifically tailored to this setting. Hierarchical and explainable algorithms are particularly valuable in this context, as they provide structured, interpretable clustering results that support informed decision-making. This paper introduces a clustering method grounded in pretopological spaces. In addition, benchmarking against classical numerical clustering algorithms and existing pretopological approaches yields insights into the performance and effectiveness of the proposed method within the big data paradigm.