Robust ensemble clustering by matrix completion

Jinfeng Yi, Tianbao Yang, Rong Jin, Anil K. Jain, Mehrdad Mahdavi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

77 Scopus citations

Abstract

Data clustering is an important task and has found applications in numerous real-world problems. Since no single clustering algorithm is able to identify all different types of cluster shapes and structures, ensemble clustering was proposed to combine different partitions of the same data generated by multiple clustering algorithms. The key idea of most ensemble clustering algorithms is to find a partition that is consistent with most of the available partitions of the input data. One problem with these algorithms is their inability to handle uncertain data pairs, i.e. data pairs for which about half of the partitions put them into the same cluster and the other half do the opposite. When the number of uncertain data pairs is large, they can mislead the ensemble clustering algorithm in generating the final partition. To overcome this limitation, we propose an ensemble clustering approach based on the technique of matrix completion. The proposed algorithm constructs a partially observed similarity matrix based on the data pairs whose cluster memberships are agreed upon by most of the clustering algorithms in the ensemble. It then deploys the matrix completion algorithm to complete the similarity matrix. The final data partition is computed by applying an efficient spectral clustering algorithm to the completed matrix. Our empirical studies with multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed algorithm performs significantly better than the state-of-the-art algorithms for ensemble clustering.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 12th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM 2012
Pages1176-1181
Number of pages6
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Event12th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM 2012 - Brussels, Belgium
Duration: Dec 10 2012Dec 13 2012

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM
ISSN (Print)1550-4786

Other

Other12th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, ICDM 2012
Country/TerritoryBelgium
CityBrussels
Period12/10/1212/13/12

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering

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