A Cross-Domain Perspective to Clustering with Uncertainty

Clustering in presence of uncertainty may be considered, at the same time, to be a pressing need and a challenge to effectively address many real-world problems. This concise literature review aims to identify and discuss the associated body of knowledge according to a cross-domain perspective. A semi-systematic methodology has allowed the selection of 68 papers, with a priority on the most recent contributions. The analysis has re-marked the relevance of the topic and has made explicit a trend to domain-specific solutions over generic-purpose approaches. On one side, this trend enables a more specific set of solutions within specific communities; on the other side, the resulting distributed approach is not always well-integrated in the mainstream and may generate a further fragmentation of the body of knowledge, mostly because of some lack of abstraction in the definition of specific problems. While these gaps are largely understandable within the research community, a lack of implementations to provide ready-to-use resources is overall critical, looking at a more and more computational and data intensive world.