Model-based co-clustering for mixed type data

International audienceThe importance of clustering for creating groups of observations is well known. The emergence of high-dimensional data sets with a huge number of features leads to co-clustering techniques, and several methods have been developed for simultaneously producing groups of observations and features.By grouping the data set into blocks (the crossing of a row-cluster and a column-cluster), these techniques can sometimes better summarize the data set and its inherent structure. The Latent Block Model (LBM) is a well-known method for performing co-clustering. However, recently, contexts with features of different types (here called mixed type data sets) are becoming more common. The LBM is not directly applicable to this kind of data set. Here a natural extension of the usual LBM to the ``Multiple Latent Block Model" (MLBM) is proposed in order to handle mixed type data sets. Inference is performed using a Stochastic EM-algorithm that embeds a Gibbs sampler, and allows for missing data situations. A model selection criterion is defined to choose the number of row and column clusters. The method is then applied to both simulated and real data sets

Textual data summarization using the Self-Organized Co-Clustering model

International audienceRecently, different studies have demonstrated the use of co-clustering, a data mining technique which simultaneously produces row-clusters of observations and column-clusters of features. The present work introduces a novel co-clustering model to easily summarize textual data in a document-term format. In addition to highlighting homogeneous co-clusters as other existing algorithms do we also distinguish noisy co-clusters from significant co-clusters, which is particularly useful for sparse document-term matrices. Furthermore, our model proposes a structure among the significant co-clusters, thus providing improved interpretability to users. The approach proposed contends with state-of-the-art methods for document and term clustering and offers user-friendly results. The model relies on the Poisson distribution and on a constrained version of the Latent Block Model, which is a probabilistic approach for co-clustering. A Stochastic Expectation-Maximization algorithm is proposed to run the model’s inference as well as a model selection criterion to choose the number of coclusters. Both simulated and real data sets illustrate the eciency of this model by its ability to easily identify relevant co-clusters