Improved Selective Deep-Learning-Based Clustering Ensemble

Abstract

Clustering ensemble integrates multiple base clustering results to improve the stability and robustness of the single clustering method. It consists of two principal steps: a generation step, which is about the creation of base clusterings, and a consensus function, which is the integration of all clusterings obtained in the generation step. However, most of the existing base clustering algorithms used in the generation step are shallow clustering algorithms such as k-means. These shallow clustering algorithms do not work well or even fail when dealing with large-scale, high-dimensional unstructured data. The emergence of deep clustering algorithms provides a solution to address this challenge. Deep clustering combines the unsupervised commonality of deep representation learning to address complex high-dimensional data clustering, which has achieved excellent performance in many fields. In light of this, we introduce deep clustering into clustering ensemble and propose an improved selective deep-learning-based clustering ensemble algorithm (ISDCE). ISDCE exploits the deep clustering algorithm with different initialization parameters to generate multiple diverse base clusterings. Next, ISDCE constructs ensemble quality and diversity evaluation metrics of base clusterings to select higher-quality and rich-diversity candidate base clusterings. Finally, a weighted graph partition consensus function is utilized to aggregate the candidate base clusterings to obtain a consensus clustering result. Extensive experimental results on various types of datasets demonstrate that ISDCE performs significantly better than existing clustering ensemble approaches.