An overview on deep clustering

Abstract

In recent years, with the great success of deep learning and especially deep unsupervised learning, many deep architectural clustering methods, collectively known as deep clustering, have emerged. Deep clustering shows the potential to outperform traditional methods, especially in handling complex high-dimensional data, taking full advantage of deep learning. To achieve a comprehensive overview of the field of deep clustering, this review systematically explores deep clustering methods and their various applications. First, the basic network architecture of deep clustering is described in detail, including the common network frameworks, and loss functions. Subsequently, deep clustering is divided into several categories based on the network architecture, and benchmark datasets and evaluation metrics in the field are introduced. Next, the real-world applications of deep clustering are explored in depth, providing successful cases in the fields of bioinformatics, medicine, anomaly detection, and image processing, highlighting the broad applicability of deep clustering in solving real-world challenges. Finally, the paper summarizes its contributions and explores potential directions for future research in deep clustering.