MATLAB Implementation of "Clustering by Fast Search and Find of Density Peaks"

Background The paper "Clustering by Fast Search and Find of Density Peaks," published in the June 2014 issue of Science, introduced an innovative clustering algorithm. This MATLAB implementation reproduces the algorithm from the paper. Key Technology The algorithm operates on the hypothesis that cluster centers are surrounded by neighbors with lower local density and are relatively distant from any points with higher density. For each data point, two quantities are computed: the point's local density and its distance to the nearest point with higher density. Both values depend on the pairwise distances between data points. The MATLAB code calculates these metrics efficiently using vectorized distance computations and density estimation functions.