AbstractThe density peaks clustering (DPC) algorithm is a classical and widely used clustering method. However, the DPC algorithm requires manual selection of cluster centers, a single way of density calculation, and cannot effectively handle low-density points. To address the above issues, we propose a novel density deviation multi-peaks automatic clustering method (AmDPC) in this paper. Firstly, we propose a new local-density and use the deviation to measure the relationship between data points and the cut-off distance ($$d_c$$ d c ). Secondly, we divide the density deviation into multiple density levels equally and extract the points with higher distances in each density level. Finally, for the multi-peak points with higher distances at low-density levels, we merge them according to the size difference of the density deviation. We finally achieve the overall automatic clustering by processing the low-density points. To verify the performance of the method, we test the synthetic dataset, the real-world dataset, and the Olivetti Face dataset, respectively. The simulation experimental results indicate that the AmDPC method can handle low-density points more effectively and has certain effectiveness and robustness.