OPTICS Clustering stands for Ordering Points To Identify Cluster Structure.

It
draws inspiration from the DBSCAN clustering algorithm. It adds two more terms
to the concepts of DBSCAN clustering.
OPTICS (Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure) is a density-based
clustering algorithm, similar to DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of
Applications with Noise), but it can extract clusters of varying densities and
shapes. It is useful for identifying clusters of different densities in large,
high-dimensional datasets.
The main idea behind OPTICS is to extract the clustering structure of a dataset
by identifying the density-connected points. The algorithm builds a density-based
representation of the data by creating an ordered list of points called the
reachability plot. Each point in the list is associated with a reachability distance,
which is a measure of how easy it is to reach that point from other points in the
dataset. Points with similar reachability distances are likely to be in the same
cluster.
The OPTICS algorithm follows these main steps:
Define a density threshold parameter, Eps, which controls the minimum density
of clusters.
For each point in the dataset, calculate the distance to its k-nearest neighbors.
Starting with an arbitrary point, calculate the reachability distance of each point in
the dataset, based on the density of its neighbors.
Order the points based on their reachability distance and create the reachability
plot.
Extract clusters from the reachability plot by grouping points that are close to
each other and have similar reachability distances.
One of the main advantages of OPTICS over DBSCAN, is that it does not require
to set the number of clusters in advance, instead, it extracts the clustering
structure of the data and produces the reachability plot. This allows the user to
have more flexibility in selecting the number of clusters, by cutting the
reachability plot at a certain point.
Also, unlike other density-based clustering algorithms like DBSCAN, It can
handle clusters of different densities and shapes and can identify hierarchical
structure.
OPTICS is implemented in Python using the sklearn.cluster.OPTICS class in the
scikit-learn library. It takes several parameters including the minimum density
threshold (Eps), the number of nearest neighbors to consider (min_samples),
and a reachability distance cutoff (xi).
They are:-

1. Core Distance: It is the minimum value of radius required to classify a

given point as a core point. If the given point is not a Core point, then
it’s Core Distance is undefined.
2. Reachability Distance: It is defined with respect to another data point

q(Let). The Reachability distance between a point p and q is the

maximum of the Core Distance of p and the Euclidean Distance(or
some other distance metric) between p and q. Note that The
Reachability Distance is not defined if q is not a Core point.

This clustering technique is different from other clustering techniques in the

sense that this technique does not explicitly segment the data into clusters.
Instead, it produces a visualization of Reachability distances and uses this
visualization to cluster the data.

OPTICS Clustering v/s DBSCAN Clustering:

1. Memory Cost : The OPTICS clustering technique requires more

memory as it maintains a priority queue (Min Heap) to determine the

next data point which is closest to the point currently being processed in
 terms of Reachability Distance. It also requires more computational
power because the nearest neighbor queries are more complicated
than radius queries in DBSCAN.
2. Fewer Parameters : The OPTICS clustering technique does not need

to maintain the epsilon parameter and is only given in the above

pseudo-code to reduce the time taken. This leads to the reduction of
the analytical process of parameter tuning.
3. This technique does not segregate the given data into clusters. It
merely produces a Reachability distance plot and it is upon the
interpretation of the programmer to cluster the points accordingly.