Cluster analysis plays an indispensable role in machine learning and data mining. Learning a good data representation is crucial for clustering algorithms. Recently, deep clustering, which can learn clustering-friendly representations using deep neural networks, has been broadly applied in a wide range of clustering tasks. Existing surveys for deep clustering mainly focus on the single-view fields and the network architectures, ignoring the complex application scenarios of clustering. To address this issue, in this paper we provide a comprehensive survey for deep clustering in views of data sources. With different data sources and initial conditions, we systematically distinguish the clustering methods in terms of methodology, prior knowledge, and architecture. Concretely, deep clustering methods are introduced according to four categories, i.e., traditional single-view deep clustering, semi-supervised deep clustering, deep multi-view clustering, and deep transfer clustering. Finally, we discuss the open challenges and potential future opportunities in different fields of deep clustering.

Multi-label learning has attracted significant attention from both academic and industry field in recent decades. Although existing multi-label learning algorithms achieved good performance in various tasks, they implicitly assume the size of target label space is not huge, which can be restrictive for real-world scenarios. Moreover, it is infeasible to directly adapt them to extremely large label space because of the compute and memory overhead. Therefore, eXtreme Multi-label Learning (XML) is becoming an important task and many effective approaches are proposed. To fully understand XML, we conduct a survey study in this paper. We first clarify a formal definition for XML from the perspective of supervised learning. Then, based on different model architectures and challenges of the problem, we provide a thorough discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each category of methods. For the benefit of conducting empirical studies, we collect abundant resources regarding XML, including code implementations, and useful tools. Lastly, we propose possible research directions in XML, such as new evaluation metrics, the tail label problem, and weakly supervised XML.

Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) is a popular algorithm used to estimates the intractable marginal likelihood of deep generative models. Although AIS is guaranteed to provide unbiased estimate for any set of hyperparameters, the common implementations rely on simple heuristics such as the geometric average bridging distributions between initial and the target distribution which affect the estimation performance when the computation budget is limited. In order to reduce the number of sampling iterations, we present a parameteric AIS process with flexible intermediary distributions defined by a residual density with respect to the geometric mean path. Our method allows parameter sharing between annealing distributions, the use of fix linear schedule for discretization and amortization of hyperparameter selection in latent variable models. We assess the performance of Optimized-Path AIS for marginal likelihood estimation of deep generative models and compare it to compare it to more computationally intensive AIS.

Robust and sparse estimation of linear regression coefficients is investigated. The situation addressed by the present paper is that covariates and noises are sampled from heavy-tailed distributions, and the covariates and noises are contaminated by malicious outliers. Our estimator can be computed efficiently. Further, the error bound of the estimator is nearly optimal.

Teachers often conduct surveys in order to collect data from a predefined group of students to gain insights into topics of interest. When analyzing surveys with open-ended textual responses, it is extremely time-consuming, labor-intensive, and difficult to manually process all the responses into an insightful and comprehensive report. In the analysis step, traditionally, the teacher has to read each of the responses and decide on how to group them in order to extract insightful information. Even though it is possible to group the responses only using certain keywords, such an approach would be limited since it not only fails to account for embedded contexts but also cannot detect polysemous words or phrases and semantics that are not expressible in single words. In this work, we present a novel end-to-end context-aware framework that extracts, aggregates, and abbreviates embedded semantic patterns in open-response survey data. Our framework relies on a pre-trained natural language model in order to encode the textual data into semantic vectors. The encoded vectors then get clustered either into an optimally tuned number of groups or into a set of groups with pre-specified titles. In the former case, the clusters are then further analyzed to extract a representative set of keywords or summary sentences that serve as the labels of the clusters. In our framework, for the designated clusters, we finally provide context-aware wordclouds that demonstrate the semantically prominent keywords within each group. Honoring user privacy, we have successfully built the on-device implementation of our framework suitable for real-time analysis on mobile devices and have tested it on a synthetic dataset. Our framework reduces the costs at-scale by automating the process of extracting the most insightful information pieces from survey data.

We explore clustering the softmax predictions of deep neural networks and introduce a novel probabilistic clustering method, referred to as k-sBetas. In the general context of clustering discrete distributions, the existing methods focused on exploring distortion measures tailored to simplex data, such as the KL divergence, as alternatives to the standard Euclidean distance. We provide a general maximum a posteriori (MAP) perspective of clustering distributions, which emphasizes that the statistical models underlying the existing distortion-based methods may not be descriptive enough. Instead, we optimize a mixed-variable objective measuring the conformity of data within each cluster to the introduced sBeta density function, whose parameters are constrained and estimated jointly with binary assignment variables. Our versatile formulation approximates a variety of parametric densities for modeling simplex data, and enables to control the cluster-balance bias. This yields highly competitive performances for unsupervised adjustments of black-box model predictions in a variety of scenarios. Our code and comparisons with the existing simplex-clustering approaches along with our introduced softmax-prediction benchmarks are publicly available: https://github.com/fchiaroni/Clustering_Softmax_Predictions.

Clickstream data, which come with a massive volume generated by human activities on websites, have become a prominent feature for identifying readers' characteristics by newsrooms after the digitization of news outlets. Although the nature of clickstream data has a similar logic within websites, it has inherent limitations in recognizing human behaviours when looking from a broad perspective, which brings the need to limit the problem in niche areas. This study investigates the anonymized readers' click activities on the organizations' websites to identify news consumption patterns following referrals from Twitter,who incidentally reach but propensity is mainly routed news content. Methodologies for ensemble cluster analysis with mixed-type embedding strategies are applied and compared to find similar reader groups and interests independent of time. Various internal validation perspectives are used to determine the optimality of the quality of clusters, where the Calinski Harabasz Index (CHI) is found to give a generalizable result. Our findings demonstrate that clustering a mixed-type dataset approaches the optimal internal validation scores, which we define to discriminate the clusters and algorithms considering applied strategies when embedded by Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) and using a consensus function as a key to access the most applicable hyperparameter configurations in the given ensemble rather than using consensus function results directly. Evaluation of the resulting clusters highlights specific clusters repeatedly present in the separated monthly samples by Adjusted Mutual Information scores greater than 0.5, which provide insights to the news organizations and overcome the degradation of the modeling behaviours due to the change in the interest over time.

The most important competency is the ability to learn quickly in a fast paced startup environment.

The novel clustering algorithm HAL-x provides insights into single-cell clustering, bridging the biomedicine sciences for healthcare purposes. With its specificity and sensitivity, it allows the generation of multiple-clustering for in-depth analysis of high-dimensional data. The future directions of algorithms are extremely promising in understanding disease, disease progression, and drug discovery. Throughout the years, clustering has been studied both extensively and intensively in statistics and machine learning. Apart from classical methods, clustering for high-dimensional data is primarily done using non-linear embeddings, which largely lacked visualization and identification of accurate clustering.

Accurately modeling quadrotor's system dynamics is critical for guaranteeing agile, safe, and stable navigation. The model needs to capture the system behavior in multiple flight regimes and operating conditions, including those producing highly nonlinear effects such as aerodynamic forces and torques, rotor interactions, or possible system configuration modifications. Classical approaches rely on handcrafted models and struggle to generalize and scale to capture these effects. In this paper, we present a novel Physics-Inspired Temporal Convolutional Network (PI-TCN) approach to learning quadrotor's system dynamics purely from robot experience. Our approach combines the expressive power of sparse temporal convolutions and dense feed-forward connections to make accurate system predictions. In addition, physics constraints are embedded in the training process to facilitate the network's generalization capabilities to data outside the training distribution. Finally, we design a model predictive control approach that incorporates the learned dynamics for accurate closed-loop trajectory tracking fully exploiting the learned model predictions in a receding horizon fashion. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach accurately extracts the structure of the quadrotor's dynamics from data, capturing effects that would remain hidden to classical approaches. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time physics-inspired deep learning is successfully applied to temporal convolutional networks and to the system identification task, while concurrently enabling predictive control.