Weighted cluster ensembles

Abstract

Cluster ensembles offer a solution to challenges inherent to clustering arising from its ill-posed nature. Cluster ensembles can provide robust and stable solutions by leveraging the consensus across multiple clustering results, while averaging out emergent spurious structures that arise due to the various biases to which each participating algorithm is tuned. In this article, we address the problem of combining multiple weighted clusters that belong to different subspaces of the input space. We leverage the diversity of the input clusterings in order to generate a consensus partition that is superior to the participating ones. Since we are dealing with weighted clusters, our consensus functions make use of the weight vectors associated with the clusters. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques by running experiments with several real datasets, including high-dimensional text data. Furthermore, we investigate in depth the issue of diversity and accuracy for our ensemble methods. Our analysis and experimental results show that the proposed techniques are capable of producing a partition that is as good as or better than the best individual clustering.