  The accelerated evolution and explosion of the Internet and social media is
generating voluminous quantities of data (on zettabyte scales). Paramount
amongst the desires to manipulate and extract actionable intelligence from vast
big data volumes is the need for scalable, performance-conscious analytics
algorithms. To directly address this need, we propose a novel MapReduce
implementation of the exemplar-based clustering algorithm known as Affinity
Propagation. Our parallelization strategy extends to the multilevel
Hierarchical Affinity Propagation algorithm and enables tiered aggregation of
unstructured data with minimal free parameters, in principle requiring only a
similarity measure between data points. We detail the linear run-time
complexity of our approach, overcoming the limiting quadratic complexity of the
original algorithm. Experimental validation of our clustering methodology on a
variety of synthetic and real data sets (e.g. images and point data)
demonstrates our competitiveness against other state-of-the-art MapReduce
clustering techniques.
