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: 5068
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 0.00012936472
Overall Rank: 962 | 93.41%
DOI: 10.1145/2723372.2737792

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Junhao Gan (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
2. Yufei Tao (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{gan_sigmod15,
        title = {{DBSCAN Revisited: Mis-Claim, Un-Fixability, and Approximation}},
        author = {Gan, Junhao and Tao, Yufei},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '15},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2723372.2737792},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2723372.2737792},
        year = {2015}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 19 of 19 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,556	NG-DBSCAN: Scalable Density-Based Clustering for Arbitrary Data	2017	VLDB	8.4162172e-05
3,020	Dynamic Density Based Clustering	2017	SIGMOD	7.8445412e-05
3,234	RP-DBSCAN: A Superfast Parallel DBSCAN Algorithm Based on Random Partitioning	2018	SIGMOD	7.6144184e-05
5,020	Unsupervised Contextual Anomaly Detection for Database Systems	2022	SIGMOD	6.3987603e-05
5,335	Clustering Stream Data by Exploring the Evolution of Density Mountain	2018	VLDB	6.2618226e-05
5,483	DenForest: Enabling Fast Deletion in Incremental Density-Based Clustering over Sliding Windows	2022	SIGMOD	6.2019677e-05
6,956	A New Sparse Data Clustering Method Based On Frequent Items	2023	SIGMOD	5.7303405e-05
7,500	Approximate DBSCAN under Differential Privacy	2025	SIGMOD	5.6029996e-05
7,862	ConnectIt: A Framework for Static and Incremental Parallel Graph Connectivity Algorithms	2021	VLDB	5.5302333e-05
8,070	Towards Metric DBSCAN: Exact, Approximate, and Streaming Algorithms	2024	SIGMOD	5.4938502e-05
8,390	Spade: A Real-Time Fraud Detection Framework on Evolving Graphs	2023	VLDB	5.4360143e-05
8,627	ThriftLLM: On Cost-Effective Selection of Large Language Models for Classification Queries	2025	VLDB	5.3969543e-05
10,195	Approximate DBSCAN via Density-Biased Sampling and Kernel Density Estimation	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,567	FB*: A Compact Index for Efficient and Exact Density-based Clustering	2026	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,667	In-Database Time Series Clustering	2025	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,253	Ensemble Clustering based on Meta-Learning and Hyperparameter Optimization	2024	VLDB	5.093636e-05
11,387	Fast Density-Based Clustering: Geometric Approach	2023	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,534	Faster and Better Solution to Embed Lp Metrics by Tree Metrics	2022	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,664	Fast Density-Peaks Clustering: Multicore-based Parallelization Approach	2021	SIGMOD	5.093636e-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
291	OPTICS: Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure	1999	SIGMOD	0.00022264197
1,285	STING: A Statistical Information Grid Approach to Spatial Data Mining	1997	VLDB	0.00011321748
1,755	Swarm: Mining Relaxed Temporal Moving Object Clusters	2010	VLDB	9.8211863e-05
4,856	Computing Clusters of Correlation Connected Objects	2004	SIGMOD	6.4752952e-05

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