Combining Multiple Clusterings via Crowd Agreement Estimation and Multi-Granularity Link Analysis

The clustering ensemble technique aims to combine multiple clusterings into a probably better and more robust clustering and has been receiving an increasing attention in recent years. There are mainly two aspects of limitations in the existing clustering ensemble approaches. Firstly, many approaches lack the ability to weight the base clusterings without access to the original data and can be affected significantly by the low-quality, or even ill clusterings. Secondly, they generally focus on the instance level or cluster level in the ensemble system and fail to integrate multi-granularity cues into a unified model. To address these two limitations, this paper proposes to solve the clustering ensemble problem via crowd agreement estimation and multi-granularity link analysis. We present the normalized crowd agreement index (NCAI) to evaluate the quality of base clusterings in an unsupervised manner and thus weight the base clusterings in accordance with their clustering validity. To explore the relationship between clusters, the source aware connected triple (SACT) similarity is introduced with regard to their common neighbors and the source reliability. Based on NCAI and multi-granularity information collected among base clusterings, clusters, and data instances, we further propose two novel consensus functions, termed weighted evidence accumulation clustering (WEAC) and graph partitioning with multi-granularity link analysis (GP-MGLA) respectively. The experiments are conducted on eight real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed methods.Comment: The MATLAB source code of this work is available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/28197031

Weighting Policies for Robust Unsupervised Ensemble Learning

The unsupervised ensemble learning, or consensus clustering, consists of finding the optimal com- bination strategy of individual partitions that is robust in comparison to the selection of an algorithmic clustering pool. Despite its strong properties, this approach assigns the same weight to the contribution of each clustering to the final solution. We propose a weighting policy for this problem that is based on internal clustering quality measures and compare against other modern approaches. Results on publicly available datasets show that weights can significantly improve the accuracy performance while retaining the robust properties. Since the issue of determining an appropriate number of clusters, which is a primary input for many clustering methods is one of the significant challenges, we have used the same methodology to predict correct or the most suitable number of clusters as well. Among various methods, using internal validity indexes in conjunction with a suitable algorithm is one of the most popular way to determine the appropriate number of cluster. Thus, we use weighted consensus clustering along with four different indexes which are Silhouette (SH), Calinski-Harabasz (CH), Davies-Bouldin (DB), and Consensus (CI) indexes. Our experiment indicates that weighted consensus clustering together with chosen indexes is a useful method to determine right or the most appropriate number of clusters in comparison to individual clustering methods (e.g., k-means) and consensus clustering. Lastly, to decrease the variance of proposed weighted consensus clustering, we borrow the idea of Markowitz portfolio theory and implement its core idea to clustering domain. We aim to optimize the combination of individual clustering methods to minimize the variance of clustering accuracy. This is a new weighting policy to produce partition with a lower variance which might be crucial for a decision maker. Our study shows that using the idea of Markowitz portfolio theory will create a partition with a less variation in comparison to traditional consensus clustering and proposed weighted consensus clustering

Clustering ensemble method

A clustering ensemble aims to combine multiple clustering models to produce a better result than that of the individual clustering algorithms in terms of consistency and quality. In this paper, we propose a clustering ensemble algorithm with a novel consensus function named Adaptive Clustering Ensemble. It employs two similarity measures, cluster similarity and a newly defined membership similarity, and works adaptively through three stages. The first stage is to transform the initial clusters into a binary representation, and the second is to aggregate the initial clusters that are most similar based on the cluster similarity measure between clusters. This iterates itself adaptively until the intended candidate clusters are produced. The third stage is to further refine the clusters by dealing with uncertain objects to produce an improved final clustering result with the desired number of clusters. Our proposed method is tested on various real-world benchmark datasets and its performance is compared with other state-of-the-art clustering ensemble methods, including the Co-association method and the Meta-Clustering Algorithm. The experimental results indicate that on average our method is more accurate and more efficient

Contribution to the knowledge of hierarchical clustering algorithms and consensus clustering. Studies applied to personal recognition by hands biometrics

In exploratory data analysis, hierarchical clustering algorithms with its features can provide different clusterings when applied to the same data set. In the presence of several clusterings, each one identifying a specific data structure, consensus clustering provide a contribution to deal with this issue. The work reported here is composed by two parts: In the first part, we intend to explore the profile of base hierarchical clusterings, according to their variabilities, to obtain the consensus clustering. As a first result of our researches, we identified the consensus clustering technique as having better performance than the others, depending on the characteristics of hierarchical clusterings used as base. This result allows us to identify a sufficient condition for the existence of consensus clustering, as well as define a new strategy to evaluate the consensus clustering. It also leads to study a new property of hierarchical clustering algorithms. In the second part, we explore a real-world application. In a first analysis, we use data sets derived by biometrics extracted from hands for personal recognition. We show that the hierarchical clusterings obtained by SEP/COP algorithms, can provide results with great accuracy when applied to these data sets. Furthermore, we found an increased 100% of recognition rate, comparing to the ones found in literature. In a second analysis, we consider the application of consensus clustering techniques to the problem of the identification of people's parenting by the hands biometrics. The results obtained indicate that hand’s photography has information that allows the identification of people’s family members but, according to our data, we didn't have very positive results (we observed a probability of 95% of the parents, and 94% of a sibling to be in the half of the more similar hands) that we believe it’s due to the poor quality of the photographs we used. However, the results indicate that the technique has potential, and if the collection of photographs is made using a scanner with fixed pins, the hand may be an interesting alternative for the identification of parenting of missing children when it is applied the consensus clustering