Lumbermark: Resistant Clustering by Chopping Up Mutual Reachability Minimum Spanning Trees

arXiv:2604.07143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Lumbermark, a robust divisive clustering algorithm capable of detecting clusters of varying sizes, densities, and shapes. Lumbermark iteratively chops off large limbs connected by protruding segments of a dataset's mutual reachability minimum spanning tree. The use of mutual reachability distances smoothens the data distribution and decreases the influence of low-density objects, such as noise points between clusters or outliers at their peripheries. The algorithm can be viewed as a divisive version of Genie and an alternative to HDBSCAN that produces partitions with user-specified sizes. A fast, easy-to-use implementation of this new method is available in the open-source lumbermark package for Python and R. We show that Lumbermark performs well on benchmark data and hope it will prove useful to data scientists and practitioners across different fields.