Cluster Ensembles - A Knowledge Reuse Framework for Combining Multiple Partitions-英文文献.pdf

Journal of Machine Learning Research 3 (2002) 583-617 Submitted 4/02; Published 12/02 Cluster Ensembles – A Knowledge Reuse Framework for Combining Multiple Partitions Alexander Strehl alexander@ Joydeep Ghosh ghosh@ Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712, USA Editor: Claire Cardie Abstract This paper introduces the problem of combining multiple partitionings of a set of objects into a single consolidated clustering without accessing the features or algorithms that deter- mined these partitionings. We first identify several application scenarios for the resultant ‘knowledge reuse’ framework that we call cluster ensembles. The cluster ensemble prob- lem is then formalized as a combinatorial optimization problem in terms of shared mutual information. In addition to a direct maximization approach, we propose three effective and efficient techniques for obtaining high-quality combiners (consensus functions). The first combiner induces a similarity measure from the partitionings and then reclusters the objects. The second combiner is based on hypergraph partitioning. The third one collapses groups of clusters into meta-clusters which then compete for each object to determine the combined clustering. Due to the low computational costs of our techniques, it is quite feasible to use a supra-consensus function that evaluates all three approaches against the objective function and picks the best solution for a given situation. We evaluate the ef- fectiveness of cluster ensembles in three qualit