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Existing data analysis techniques have difficulty in handling multidimensional data. Multidimensional data has been a challenge for data analysis because of the inherent sparsity of the points. In this paper, we first present a novel data preprocessing technique called shrinking which optimizes the inherent characteristic of distribution of data. This data reorganization concept can be applied in many fields such as pattern recognition, data clustering, and signal processing. Then, as an important application of the data shrinking preprocessing, we propose a shrinking-based approach for multidimensional data analysis which consists of three steps: data shrinking, cluster detection, and cluster evaluation and selection. The process of data shrinking moves data points along the direction of the density gradient, thus generating condensed, widely-separated clusters. Following data shrinking, clusters are detected by finding the connected components of dense cells (and evaluated by their compactness). The data-shrinking and cluster-detection steps are conducted on a sequence of grids with different cell sizes. The clusters detected at these scales are compared by a cluster- wise evaluation measurement, and the best clusters are selected as the final result. The experimental results show that this approach can effectively and efficiently detect clusters in both low and high-dimensional spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]