LSEC: Large-scale spectral ensemble clustering

Abstract

A fundamental problem in machine learning is ensemble clustering, that is, combining multiple base clusterings to obtain improved clustering result. However, most of the existing methods are unsuitable for large-scale ensemble clustering tasks owing to efficiency bottlenecks. In this paper, we propose a large-scale spectral ensemble clustering (LSEC) method to balance efficiency and effectiveness. In LSEC, a large-scale spectral clustering-based efficient ensemble generation framework is designed to generate various base clusterings with low computational complexity. Thereafter, all the base clusterings are combined using a bipartite graph partition-based consensus function to obtain improved consensus clustering results. The LSEC method achieves a lower computational complexity than most existing ensemble clustering methods. Experiments conducted on ten large-scale datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the LSEC method. The MATLAB code of the proposed method and experimental datasets are available at https://github.com/Li-Hongmin/MyPaperWithCode.