Consensus Function Based on Clusters Clustering and Iterative Fusion of Base Clusters

Abstract

In clustering ensemble, it is desired to combine several clustering outputs in order to create better results than the output results of the basic individual clustering methods in terms of consistency, robustness and performance. In this research, we want to present a clustering ensemble method with a new aggregation function. The proposed method is named Robust Clustering Ensemble based on Iterative Fusion of Base Clusters (RCEIFBC). This method takes into account the two similarity criteria: (a) one of them is the cluster-cluster similarity and (b) the other one is the object-cluster similarity. The proposed method has two steps and has been done on the binary cluster representation of the given ensemble. Indeed, before doing any step, the primary partitions are converted into a binary cluster representation where the primary ensemble has been broken into a number of primary binary clusters. The first step is to combine the primary binary clusters with the highest cluster-cluster similarity. This phase will be replicated as long as our desired candidate clusters are ready. The second step is to improve the merged clusters by assigning the data points to the merged clusters. The performance and robustness of the proposed method have been evaluated over different machine learning datasets. The experimentation indicates the effectiveness of the proposed method comparing to the state-of-the-art clustering methods in terms of performance and robustness.