Clustering
Distributed MCMC inference for Bayesian Non-Parametric Latent Block Model
Khoufache, Reda, Belhadj, Anisse, Azzag, Hanene, Lebbah, Mustapha
Given a data matrix, where rows represent observations and columns represent variables or features, co-clustering, also known as bi-clustering aims to infer a row partition and a column partition simultaneously. The resulting partition is composed of homogeneous blocks. When a dataset exhibits a dual structure between observations and variables, co-clustering outperforms conventional clustering algorithms which only infers a row partition without considering the relationships between observations and variables. Co-clustering is a powerful data mining tool for two-dimensional data and is widely applied in various fields such as bioinformatics [1]. To tackle the co-clustering problem, the Latent Block Model (LBM) was introduced by [2].
Graph-based Clustering for Detecting Semantic Change Across Time and Languages
Ma, Xianghe, Strube, Michael, Zhao, Wei
Despite the predominance of contextualized embeddings in NLP, approaches to detect semantic change relying on these embeddings and clustering methods underperform simpler counterparts based on static word embeddings. This stems from the poor quality of the clustering methods to produce sense clusters -- which struggle to capture word senses, especially those with low frequency. This issue hinders the next step in examining how changes in word senses in one language influence another. To address this issue, we propose a graph-based clustering approach to capture nuanced changes in both high- and low-frequency word senses across time and languages, including the acquisition and loss of these senses over time. Our experimental results show that our approach substantially surpasses previous approaches in the SemEval2020 binary classification task across four languages. Moreover, we showcase the ability of our approach as a versatile visualization tool to detect semantic changes in both intra-language and inter-language setups. We make our code and data publicly available.
Deep Clustering Using the Soft Silhouette Score: Towards Compact and Well-Separated Clusters
Vardakas, Georgios, Papakostas, Ioannis, Likas, Aristidis
Unsupervised learning has become increasingly important due to the rise of big data collection and the high cost associated with acquiring labeled data. This field of research encompasses various techniques, some of which include generative models [1], representation learning, dimensionality reduction [2] and clustering [3]. Such methods enable us to extract meaningful insight on properties of the data, without relying on explicit guidance or supervision from pre-existing labels. Clustering is a fundamental unsupervised learning task with numerous applications in computer science and many other scientific fields [4-6]. Even though a strict definition of clustering may be challenging to establish, a more flexible interpretation can be stated as follows: Clustering is the process of partitioning a set of objects into groups, known as clusters, such that data in the same group share "common" characteristics while "differing" from data in other groups. While the above clustering definition is simple, it is proven to be a hard machine learning problem [7]. More specifically, it is known that its difficulty arises from several factors like data prepossessing and representation, clustering criterion, optimization algorithm and parameter initialization. Due to its particular importance, clustering is a well-studied problem with numerous proposed approaches. Generally, they can be classified as hierarchical (divisive or agglomerative), model-based (e.g.
Multi-scale Traffic Pattern Bank for Cross-city Few-shot Traffic Forecasting
Liu, Zhanyu, Zheng, Guanjie, Yu, Yanwei
Traffic forecasting is crucial for intelligent transportation systems (ITS), aiding in efficient resource allocation and effective traffic control. However, its effectiveness often relies heavily on abundant traffic data, while many cities lack sufficient data due to limited device support, posing a significant challenge for traffic forecasting. Recognizing this challenge, we have made a noteworthy observation: traffic patterns exhibit similarities across diverse cities. Building on this key insight, we propose a solution for the cross-city few-shot traffic forecasting problem called Multi-scale Traffic Pattern Bank (MTPB). Primarily, MTPB initiates its learning process by leveraging data-rich source cities, effectively acquiring comprehensive traffic knowledge through a spatial-temporal-aware pre-training process. Subsequently, the framework employs advanced clustering techniques to systematically generate a multi-scale traffic pattern bank derived from the learned knowledge. Next, the traffic data of the data-scarce target city could query the traffic pattern bank, facilitating the aggregation of meta-knowledge. This meta-knowledge, in turn, assumes a pivotal role as a robust guide in subsequent processes involving graph reconstruction and forecasting. Empirical assessments conducted on real-world traffic datasets affirm the superior performance of MTPB, surpassing existing methods across various categories and exhibiting numerous attributes conducive to the advancement of cross-city few-shot forecasting methodologies. The code is available in https://github.com/zhyliu00/MTPB.
Datacube segmentation via Deep Spectral Clustering
Bombini, Alessandro, Bofías, Fernando García-Avello, Bracci, Caterina, Ginolfi, Michele, Ruberto, Chiara
Extended Vision techniques are ubiquitous in physics. However, the data cubes steaming from such analysis often pose a challenge in their interpretation, due to the intrinsic difficulty in discerning the relevant information from the spectra composing the data cube. Furthermore, the huge dimensionality of data cube spectra poses a complex task in its statistical interpretation; nevertheless, this complexity contains a massive amount of statistical information that can be exploited in an unsupervised manner to outline some essential properties of the case study at hand, e.g.~it is possible to obtain an image segmentation via (deep) clustering of data-cube's spectra, performed in a suitably defined low-dimensional embedding space. To tackle this topic, we explore the possibility of applying unsupervised clustering methods in encoded space, i.e. perform deep clustering on the spectral properties of datacube pixels. A statistical dimensional reduction is performed by an ad hoc trained (Variational) AutoEncoder, in charge of mapping spectra into lower dimensional metric spaces, while the clustering process is performed by a (learnable) iterative K-Means clustering algorithm. We apply this technique to two different use cases, of different physical origins: a set of Macro mapping X-Ray Fluorescence (MA-XRF) synthetic data on pictorial artworks, and a dataset of simulated astrophysical observations.
Harnessing Smartwatch Microphone Sensors for Cough Detection and Classification
Jaiswal, Pranay, Lone, Haroon R.
This study investigates the potential of using smartwatches with built-in microphone sensors for monitoring coughs and detecting various cough types. We conducted a study involving 32 participants and collected 9 hours of audio data in a controlled manner. Afterward, we processed this data using a structured approach, resulting in 223 positive cough samples. We further improved the dataset through augmentation techniques and employed a specialized 1D CNN model. This model achieved an impressive accuracy rate of 98.49% while non-walking and 98.2% while walking, showing smartwatches can detect cough. Moreover, our research successfully identified four distinct types of coughs using clustering techniques.
Gower's similarity coefficients with automatic weight selection
Nearest-neighbor methods have become popular in statistics and play a key role in statistical learning. Important decisions in nearest-neighbor methods concern the variables to use (when many potential candidates exist) and how to measure the dissimilarity between units. The first decision depends on the scope of the application while second depends mainly on the type of variables. Unfortunately, relatively few options permit to handle mixed-type variables, a situation frequently encountered in practical applications. The most popular dissimilarity for mixed-type variables is derived as the complement to one of the Gower's similarity coefficient. It is appealing because ranges between 0 and 1, being an average of the scaled dissimilarities calculated variable by variable, handles missing values and allows for a user-defined weighting scheme when averaging dissimilarities. The discussion on the weighting schemes is sometimes misleading since it often ignores that the unweighted "standard" setting hides an unbalanced contribution of the single variables to the overall dissimilarity. We address this drawback following the recent idea of introducing a weighting scheme that minimizes the differences in the correlation between each contributing dissimilarity and the resulting weighted Gower's dissimilarity. In particular, this note proposes different approaches for measuring the correlation depending on the type of variables. The performances of the proposed approaches are evaluated in simulation studies related to classification and imputation of missing values.
Sparse Portfolio Selection via Topological Data Analysis based Clustering
Goel, Anubha, Filipović, Damir, Pasricha, Puneet
This paper uses topological data analysis (TDA) tools and introduces a data-driven clustering-based stock selection strategy tailored for sparse portfolio construction. Our asset selection strategy exploits the topological features of stock price movements to select a subset of topologically similar (different) assets for a sparse index tracking (Markowitz) portfolio. We introduce new distance measures, which serve as an input to the clustering algorithm, on the space of persistence diagrams and landscapes that consider the time component of a time series. We conduct an empirical analysis on the S\&P index from 2009 to 2020, including a study on the COVID-19 data to validate the robustness of our methodology. Our strategy to integrate TDA with the clustering algorithm significantly enhanced the performance of sparse portfolios across various performance measures in diverse market scenarios.
Consistency Enhancement-Based Deep Multiview Clustering via Contrastive Learning
Yang, Hao, Mao, Hua, Woo, Wai Lok, Chen, Jie, Peng, Xi
Multiview clustering (MVC) segregates data samples into meaningful clusters by synthesizing information across multiple views. Moreover, deep learning-based methods have demonstrated their strong feature learning capabilities in MVC scenarios. However, effectively generalizing feature representations while maintaining consistency is still an intractable problem. In addition, most existing deep clustering methods based on contrastive learning overlook the consistency of the clustering representations during the clustering process. In this paper, we show how the above problems can be overcome and propose a consistent enhancement-based deep MVC method via contrastive learning (CCEC). Specifically, semantic connection blocks are incorporated into a feature representation to preserve the consistent information among multiple views. Furthermore, the representation process for clustering is enhanced through spectral clustering, and the consistency across multiple views is improved. Experiments conducted on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method in comparison with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. The code for this method can be accessed at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CCEC-E84E/.
Multi-view Subspace Clustering via An Adaptive Consensus Graph Filter
Multiview subspace clustering (MVSC) has attracted an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Most existing MVSC methods first collect complementary information from different views and consequently derive a consensus reconstruction coefficient matrix to indicate the subspace structure of a multi-view data set. In this paper, we initially assume the existence of a consensus reconstruction coefficient matrix and then use it to build a consensus graph filter. In each view, the filter is employed for smoothing the data and designing a regularizer for the reconstruction coefficient matrix. Finally, the obtained reconstruction coefficient matrices from different views are used to create constraints for the consensus reconstruction coefficient matrix. Therefore, in the proposed method, the consensus reconstruction coefficient matrix, the consensus graph filter, and the reconstruction coefficient matrices from different views are interdependent. We provide an optimization algorithm to obtain their optimal values. Extensive experiments on diverse multi-view data sets demonstrate that our approach outperforms some state-of-the-art methods.