3,896 research outputs found
Methods of Hierarchical Clustering
We survey agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithms and discuss
efficient implementations that are available in R and other software
environments. We look at hierarchical self-organizing maps, and mixture models.
We review grid-based clustering, focusing on hierarchical density-based
approaches. Finally we describe a recently developed very efficient (linear
time) hierarchical clustering algorithm, which can also be viewed as a
hierarchical grid-based algorithm.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 1 table, 69 reference
Nonparametric Feature Extraction from Dendrograms
We propose feature extraction from dendrograms in a nonparametric way. The
Minimax distance measures correspond to building a dendrogram with single
linkage criterion, with defining specific forms of a level function and a
distance function over that. Therefore, we extend this method to arbitrary
dendrograms. We develop a generalized framework wherein different distance
measures can be inferred from different types of dendrograms, level functions
and distance functions. Via an appropriate embedding, we compute a vector-based
representation of the inferred distances, in order to enable many numerical
machine learning algorithms to employ such distances. Then, to address the
model selection problem, we study the aggregation of different dendrogram-based
distances respectively in solution space and in representation space in the
spirit of deep representations. In the first approach, for example for the
clustering problem, we build a graph with positive and negative edge weights
according to the consistency of the clustering labels of different objects
among different solutions, in the context of ensemble methods. Then, we use an
efficient variant of correlation clustering to produce the final clusters. In
the second approach, we investigate the sequential combination of different
distances and features sequentially in the spirit of multi-layered
architectures to obtain the final features. Finally, we demonstrate the
effectiveness of our approach via several numerical studies
A Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering of Faces
In this paper, we propose an unsupervised face clustering algorithm called
"Proximity-Aware Hierarchical Clustering" (PAHC) that exploits the local
structure of deep representations. In the proposed method, a similarity measure
between deep features is computed by evaluating linear SVM margins. SVMs are
trained using nearest neighbors of sample data, and thus do not require any
external training data. Clusters are then formed by thresholding the similarity
scores. We evaluate the clustering performance using three challenging
unconstrained face datasets, including Celebrity in Frontal-Profile (CFP),
IARPA JANUS Benchmark A (IJB-A), and JANUS Challenge Set 3 (JANUS CS3)
datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can
achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, we
also show that the proposed clustering algorithm can be applied to curate a set
of large-scale and noisy training dataset while maintaining sufficient amount
of images and their variations due to nuisance factors. The face verification
performance on JANUS CS3 improves significantly by finetuning a DCNN model with
the curated MS-Celeb-1M dataset which contains over three million face images
Optimal Kullback-Leibler Aggregation via Information Bottleneck
In this paper, we present a method for reducing a regular, discrete-time
Markov chain (DTMC) to another DTMC with a given, typically much smaller number
of states. The cost of reduction is defined as the Kullback-Leibler divergence
rate between a projection of the original process through a partition function
and a DTMC on the correspondingly partitioned state space. Finding the reduced
model with minimal cost is computationally expensive, as it requires an
exhaustive search among all state space partitions, and an exact evaluation of
the reduction cost for each candidate partition. Our approach deals with the
latter problem by minimizing an upper bound on the reduction cost instead of
minimizing the exact cost; The proposed upper bound is easy to compute and it
is tight if the original chain is lumpable with respect to the partition. Then,
we express the problem in the form of information bottleneck optimization, and
propose using the agglomerative information bottleneck algorithm for searching
a sub-optimal partition greedily, rather than exhaustively. The theory is
illustrated with examples and one application scenario in the context of
modeling bio-molecular interactions.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure
Latent Class Model with Application to Speaker Diarization
In this paper, we apply a latent class model (LCM) to the task of speaker
diarization. LCM is similar to Patrick Kenny's variational Bayes (VB) method in
that it uses soft information and avoids premature hard decisions in its
iterations. In contrast to the VB method, which is based on a generative model,
LCM provides a framework allowing both generative and discriminative models.
The discriminative property is realized through the use of i-vector (Ivec),
probabilistic linear discriminative analysis (PLDA), and a support vector
machine (SVM) in this work. Systems denoted as LCM-Ivec-PLDA, LCM-Ivec-SVM, and
LCM-Ivec-Hybrid are introduced. In addition, three further improvements are
applied to enhance its performance. 1) Adding neighbor windows to extract more
speaker information for each short segment. 2) Using a hidden Markov model to
avoid frequent speaker change points. 3) Using an agglomerative hierarchical
cluster to do initialization and present hard and soft priors, in order to
overcome the problem of initial sensitivity. Experiments on the National
Institute of Standards and Technology Rich Transcription 2009 speaker
diarization database, under the condition of a single distant microphone, show
that the diarization error rate (DER) of the proposed methods has substantial
relative improvements compared with mainstream systems. Compared to the VB
method, the relative improvements of LCM-Ivec-PLDA, LCM-Ivec-SVM, and
LCM-Ivec-Hybrid systems are 23.5%, 27.1%, and 43.0%, respectively. Experiments
on our collected database, CALLHOME97, CALLHOME00 and SRE08 short2-summed trial
conditions also show that the proposed LCM-Ivec-Hybrid system has the best
overall performance
- …