DBSCAN Revisited: Mis-Claim, Un-Fixability, and Approximation

Summary: Revisits DBSCAN, debunking the KDD'96 O(n log n) claim; real worst-case is O(n^2), with a 2D fix yielding O(n log n) and a d≥3 Omega(n^(4/3)) lower bound. Proposes rho-approximate DBSCAN, achieving O(n) expected time in any dimension at bounded inaccuracy, suggesting it as the practical replacement for big data. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 5007
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 0.00015286593
Overall Rank: 918 | 93.63%
DOI: 10.1145/2723372.2737792

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Junhao Gan
2. Yufei Tao

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 18 of 18 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,669	NG-DBSCAN: Scalable Density-Based Clustering for Arbitrary Data	2017	VLDB	8.3429208e-05
3,078	Dynamic Density Based Clustering	2017	SIGMOD	7.6041723e-05
3,296	RP-DBSCAN: A Superfast Parallel DBSCAN Algorithm Based on Random Partitioning	2018	SIGMOD	7.2553154e-05
4,917	Unsupervised Contextual Anomaly Detection for Database Systems	2022	SIGMOD	5.8272504e-05
5,315	Clustering Stream Data by Exploring the Evolution of Density Mountain	2018	VLDB	5.5702177e-05
6,000	A New Sparse Data Clustering Method Based On Frequent Items	2023	SIGMOD	5.2365238e-05
6,045	DenForest: Enabling Fast Deletion in Incremental Density-Based Clustering over Sliding Windows	2022	SIGMOD	5.2360534e-05
7,479	Towards Metric DBSCAN: Exact, Approximate, and Streaming Algorithms	2024	SIGMOD	4.7135369e-05
7,874	ConnectIt: A Framework for Static and Incremental Parallel Graph Connectivity Algorithms	2021	VLDB	4.6263724e-05
8,425	Spade: A Real-Time Fraud Detection Framework on Evolving Graphs	2023	VLDB	4.5111051e-05
9,240	ThriftLLM: On Cost-Effective Selection of Large Language Models for Classification Queries	2025	VLDB	4.3648789e-05
10,280	FB*: A Compact Index for Efficient and Exact Density-based Clustering	2026	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
10,391	In-Database Time Series Clustering	2025	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
10,480	Approximate DBSCAN under Differential Privacy	2025	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
11,048	Ensemble Clustering based on Meta-Learning and Hyperparameter Optimization	2024	VLDB	4.1905499e-05
11,184	Fast Density-Based Clustering: Geometric Approach	2023	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
11,337	Faster and Better Solution to Embed Lp Metrics by Tree Metrics	2022	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05
11,469	Fast Density-Peaks Clustering: Multicore-based Parallelization Approach	2021	SIGMOD	4.1905499e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
263	OPTICS: Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure	1999	SIGMOD	0.00029955858
1,083	STING : A Statistical Information Grid Approach to Spatial Data Mining	1997	VLDB	0.00014181803
1,704	Swarm: Mining Relaxed Temporal Moving Object Clusters	2010	VLDB	0.00010814313
4,125	Computing Clusters of Correlation Connected Objects	2004	SIGMOD	6.4248096e-05

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1,803	Incremental Clustering for Mining in a Data Warehousing Environment	1998	VLDB	0.00010481475
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3,078	Dynamic Density Based Clustering	2017	SIGMOD	7.6041723e-05
5,417	Theoretically-Efficient and Practical Parallel DBSCAN	2020	SIGMOD	5.5162242e-05
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