Spectral Clustering via Ensemble Deep Autoencoder Learning (SC-EDAE)

Abstract--Recently, a number of works have studied clustering strategies that combine classical clustering algorithms and deep learning methods. These approaches follow either a sequential way, where a deep representation is learned using a deep autoencoder before obtaining clusters with k-means, or a simultaneous way,where deep representation and clusters are learned jointly by optimizing a single objective function. Both strategies improve clustering performance, however the robustness of these approaches is impeded by several deep autoencoder setting issues, among which the weights initialization, the width and number of layers or the number of epochs. To alleviate the impact of such hyperparameters setting on the clustering performance, we propose a new model which combines the spectral clustering and deep autoencoder strengths in an ensemble learning framework. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate thepotential and robustness of our approach compared to state-of-the art deep clustering methods. I. INTRODUCTION Learning from large amount of data is a very challenging task. Several dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques thatare well studied in the literature aim to learn a suitable and simplified data representation from original dataset; see for instance [1-3]. While many approaches have been proposed to address the dimensionality reduction and clustering tasks, deep learning-based methods recently demonstrate promisingresults.