Clustering ensemble, or consensus clustering, has emerged as a powerful tool for improving both the robustness and the stability of results from individual clustering methods. Weighted clustering ensemble arises naturally from clustering ensemble. One of the arguments for weighted clustering ensemble is that elements (clusterings or clusters) in a clustering ensemble are of different quality, or that objects or features are of varying significance. However, it is not possible to directly apply the weighting mechanisms from classification (supervised) domain to clustering (unsupervised) domain, also because clustering is inherently an ill-posed problem. This paper provides an overview of weighted clustering ensemble by discussing different types of weights, major approaches to determining weight values, and applications of weighted clustering ensemble to complex data. The unifying framework presented in this paper will help clustering practitioners select the most appropriate weighting mechanisms for their own problems.
This study concentrates on clustering problems and aims to find compact clusters that are informative regarding the outcome variable. The main goal is partitioning data points so that observations in each cluster are similar and the outcome variable can be predicated using these clusters simultaneously. We model this semi-supervised clustering problem as a multi-objective optimization problem with considering deviation of data points in clusters and prediction error of the outcome variable as two objective functions to be minimized. For finding optimal clustering solutions, we employ a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II approach and local regression is applied as prediction method for the output variable. For comparing the performance of the proposed model, we compute seven models using five real-world data sets. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of using local regression for predicting the outcome variable in all models, and examine the performance of the multi-objective models compared to single-objective models.
With the explosive growth of information technology, multi-view graph data have become increasingly prevalent and valuable. Most existing multi-view clustering techniques either focus on the scenario of multiple graphs or multi-view attributes. In this paper, we propose a generic framework to cluster multi-view attributed graph data. Specifically, inspired by the success of contrastive learning, we propose multi-view contrastive graph clustering (MCGC) method to learn a consensus graph since the original graph could be noisy or incomplete and is not directly applicable. Our method composes of two key steps: we first filter out the undesirable high-frequency noise while preserving the graph geometric features via graph filtering and obtain a smooth representation of nodes; we then learn a consensus graph regularized by graph contrastive loss. Results on several benchmark datasets show the superiority of our method with respect to state-of-the-art approaches. In particular, our simple approach outperforms existing deep learning-based methods.
The usage of smartphone-collected respiratory sound, trained with deep learning models, for detecting and classifying COVID-19 becomes popular recently. It removes the need for in-person testing procedures especially for rural regions where related medical supplies, experienced workers, and equipment are limited. However, existing sound-based diagnostic approaches are trained in a fully supervised manner, which requires large scale well-labelled data. It is critical to discover new methods to leverage unlabelled respiratory data, which can be obtained more easily. In this paper, we propose a novel self-supervised learning enabled framework for COVID-19 cough classification. A contrastive pre-training phase is introduced to train a Transformer-based feature encoder with unlabelled data. Specifically, we design a random masking mechanism to learn robust representations of respiratory sounds. The pre-trained feature encoder is then fine-tuned in the downstream phase to perform cough classification. In addition, different ensembles with varied random masking rates are also explored in the downstream phase. Through extensive evaluations, we demonstrate that the proposed contrastive pre-training, the random masking mechanism, and the ensemble architecture contribute to improving cough classification performance.
In semi-supervised domain adaptation, a few labeled samples per class in the target domain guide features of the remaining target samples to aggregate around them. However, the trained model cannot produce a highly discriminative feature representation for the target domain because the training data is dominated by labeled samples from the source domain. This could lead to disconnection between the labeled and unlabeled target samples as well as misalignment between unlabeled target samples and the source domain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Cross-domain Adaptive Clustering to address this problem. To achieve both inter-domain and intra-domain adaptation, we first introduce an adversarial adaptive clustering loss to group features of unlabeled target data into clusters and perform cluster-wise feature alignment across the source and target domains. We further apply pseudo labeling to unlabeled samples in the target domain and retain pseudo-labels with high confidence. Pseudo labeling expands the number of ``labeled" samples in each class in the target domain, and thus produces a more robust and powerful cluster core for each class to facilitate adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including DomainNet, Office-Home and Office, demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves the state-of-the-art performance in semi-supervised domain adaptation.
Attributed graph clustering is challenging as it requires joint modelling of graph structures and node attributes. Recent progress on graph convolutional networks has proved that graph convolution is effective in combining structural and content information, and several recent methods based on it have achieved promising clustering performance on some real attributed networks. However, there is limited understanding of how graph convolution affects clustering performance and how to properly use it to optimize performance for different graphs. Existing methods essentially use graph convolution of a fixed and low order that only takes into account neighbours within a few hops of each node, which underutilizes node relations and ignores the diversity of graphs. In this paper, we propose an adaptive graph convolution method for attributed graph clustering that exploits high-order graph convolution to capture global cluster structure and adaptively selects the appropriate order for different graphs. We establish the validity of our method by theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on benchmark datasets. Empirical results show that our method compares favourably with state-of-the-art methods.
The unsupervised text clustering is one of the major tasks in natural language processing (NLP) and remains a difficult and complex problem. Conventional \mbox{methods} generally treat this task using separated steps, including text representation learning and clustering the representations. As an improvement, neural methods have also been introduced for continuous representation learning to address the sparsity problem. However, the multi-step process still deviates from the unified optimization target. Especially the second step of cluster is generally performed with conventional methods such as k-Means. We propose a pure neural framework for text clustering in an end-to-end manner. It jointly learns the text representation and the clustering model. Our model works well when the context can be obtained, which is nearly always the case in the field of NLP. We have our method \mbox{evaluated} on two widely used benchmarks: IMDB movie reviews for sentiment classification and $20$-Newsgroup for topic categorization. Despite its simplicity, experiments show the model outperforms previous clustering methods by a large margin. Furthermore, the model is also verified on English wiki dataset as a large corpus.
We present a new clustering method in the form of a single clustering equation that is able to directly discover groupings in the data. The main proposition is that the first neighbor of each sample is all one needs to discover large chains and finding the groups in the data. In contrast to most existing clustering algorithms our method does not require any hyper-parameters, distance thresholds and/or the need to specify the number of clusters. The proposed algorithm belongs to the family of hierarchical agglomerative methods. The technique has a very low computational overhead, is easily scalable and applicable to large practical problems. Evaluation on well known datasets from different domains ranging between 1077 and 8.1 million samples shows substantial performance gains when compared to the existing clustering techniques.
The eigendeomposition of nearest-neighbor (NN) graph Laplacian matrices is the main computational bottleneck in spectral clustering. In this work, we introduce a highly-scalable, spectrum-preserving graph sparsification algorithm that enables to build ultra-sparse NN (u-NN) graphs with guaranteed preservation of the original graph spectrums, such as the first few eigenvectors of the original graph Laplacian. Our approach can immediately lead to scalable spectral clustering of large data networks without sacrificing solution quality. The proposed method starts from constructing low-stretch spanning trees (LSSTs) from the original graphs, which is followed by iteratively recovering small portions of "spectrally critical" off-tree edges to the LSSTs by leveraging a spectral off-tree embedding scheme. To determine the suitable amount of off-tree edges to be recovered to the LSSTs, an eigenvalue stability checking scheme is proposed, which enables to robustly preserve the first few Laplacian eigenvectors within the sparsified graph. Additionally, an incremental graph densification scheme is proposed for identifying extra edges that have been missing in the original NN graphs but can still play important roles in spectral clustering tasks. Our experimental results for a variety of well-known data sets show that the proposed method can dramatically reduce the complexity of NN graphs, leading to significant speedups in spectral clustering.
In recent years with the rise of Cloud Computing (CC), many companies providing services in the cloud, are empowered a new series of services to their catalog, such as data mining (DM) and data processing, taking advantage of the vast computing resources available to them. Different service definition proposals have been proposed to address the problem of describing services in CC in a comprehensive way. Bearing in mind that each provider has its own definition of the logic of its services, and specifically of DM services, it should be pointed out that the possibility of describing services in a flexible way between providers is fundamental in order to maintain the usability and portability of this type of CC services. The use of semantic technologies based on the proposal offered by Linked Data (LD) for the definition of services, allows the design and modelling of DM services, achieving a high degree of interoperability. In this article a schema for the definition of DM services on CC is presented, in addition are considered all key aspects of service in CC, such as prices, interfaces, Software Level Agreement, instances or workflow of experimentation, among others. The proposal presented is based on LD, so that it reuses other schemata obtaining a best definition of the service. For the validation of the schema, a series of DM services have been created where some of the best known algorithms such as \textit{Random Forest} or \textit{KMeans} are modeled as services.
In this paper we introduce an ensemble method for convolutional neural network (CNN), called "virtual branching," which can be implemented with nearly no additional parameters and computation on top of standard CNNs. We propose our method in the context of person re-identification (re-ID). Our CNN model consists of shared bottom layers, followed by "virtual" branches, where neurons from a block of regular convolutional and fully-connected layers are partitioned into multiple sets. Each virtual branch is trained with different data to specialize in different aspects, e.g., a specific body region or pose orientation. In this way, robust ensemble representations are obtained against human body misalignment, deformations, or variations in viewing angles, at nearly no any additional cost. The proposed method achieves competitive performance on multiple person re-ID benchmark datasets, including Market-1501, CUHK03, and DukeMTMC-reID.