Fusion of Similarity Data in Clustering

Fusing multiple information sources can yield significant benefits to successfully accomplish learning tasks. Many studies have focussed on fusing information in supervised learning contexts. We present an approach to utilize multiple information sources in the form of similarity data for unsupervised learning. Based on similarity information, the clustering task is phrased as a nonnegative matrix factorization problem of a mixture of similarity measurements. The tradeoff between the informativeness of data sources and the sparseness of their mixture is controlled by an entropy-based weighting mechanism. For the purpose of model selection, a stability-based approach is employed to ensure the selection of the most self-consistent hypothesis. The experiments demonstrate the performance of the method on toy as well as real world data sets.