A maximum margin clustering algorithm based on indefinite kernels

Abstract

Indefinite kernels have attracted more and more attentions in machine learning due to its wider application scope than usual positive definite kernels. However, the research about indefinite kernel clustering is relatively scarce. Furthermore, existing clustering methods are mainly designed based on positive definite kernels which are incapable in indefinite kernel scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel indefinite kernel clustering algorithm termed as indefinite kernel maximum margin clustering (IKMMC) based on the state-of-the-art maximum margin clustering (MMC) model. IKMMC tries to find a proxy positive definite kernel to approximate the original indefinite one and thus embeds a new F-norm regularizer in the objective function to measure the diversity of the two kernels, which can be further optimized by an iterative approach. Concretely, at each iteration, given a set of initial class labels, IKMMC firstly transforms the clustering problem into a classification one solved by indefinite kernel support vector machine (IKSVM) with an extra class balance constraint and then the obtained prediction labels will be used as the new input class labels at next iteration until the error rate of prediction is smaller than a pre-specified tolerance. Finally, IKMMC utilizes the prediction labels at the last iteration as the expected indices of clusters. Moreover, we further extend IKMMC from binary clustering problems to more complex multi-class scenarios. Experimental results have shown the superiority of our algorithms.