Detecting arbitrarily shaped clusters in high-dimensional noisy data is challenging for current clustering methods. We introduce SHADE (Structure-preserving High-dimensional Analysis with Density-based Exploration), the first deep clustering algorithm that incorporates density-connectivity into its loss function. Similar to existing deep clustering algorithms, SHADE supports high-dimensional and large data sets with the expressive power of a deep autoencoder. In contrast to most existing deep clustering methods that rely on a centroid-based clustering objective, SHADE incorporates a novel loss function that captures density-connectivity. SHADE thereby learns a representation that enhances the separation of density-connected clusters. SHADE detects a stable clustering and noise points fully automatically without any user input. It outperforms existing methods in clustering quality, especially on data that contain non-Gaussian clusters, such as video data. Moreover, the embedded space of SHADE is suitable for visualization and interpretation of the clustering results as the individual shapes of the clusters are preserved.

High-dimensional datasets often contain multiple meaningful clusterings in different subspaces. For example, objects can be clustered either by color, weight, or size, revealing different interpretations of the given dataset. A variety of approaches are able to identify such non-redundant clusterings. However, most of these methods require the user to specify the expected number of subspaces and clusters for each subspace. Stating these values is a non-trivial problem and usually requires detailed knowledge of the input dataset. In this paper, we propose a framework that utilizes the Minimum Description Length Principle (MDL) to detect the number of subspaces and clusters per subspace automatically. We describe an efficient procedure that greedily searches the parameter space by splitting and merging subspaces and clusters within subspaces. Additionally, an encoding strategy is introduced that allows us to detect outliers in each subspace. Extensive experiments show that our approach is highly competitive to state-of-the-art methods.

Over the last decade, the Dip-test of unimodality has gained increasing interest in the data mining community as it is a parameter-free statistical test that reliably rates the modality in one-dimensional samples. It returns a so called Dip-value and a corresponding probability for the sample's unimodality (Dip-p-value). These two values share a sigmoidal relationship. However, the specific transformation is dependent on the sample size. Many Dip-based clustering algorithms use bootstrapped look-up tables translating Dip- to Dip-p-values for a certain limited amount of sample sizes. We propose a specifically designed sigmoid function as a substitute for these state-of-the-art look-up tables. This accelerates computation and provides an approximation of the Dip- to Dip-p-value transformation for every single sample size. Further, it is differentiable and can therefore easily be integrated in learning schemes using gradient descent. We showcase this by exploiting our function in a novel subspace clustering algorithm called Dip'n'Sub. We highlight in extensive experiments the various benefits of our proposal.

Anomaly detection in imbalanced datasets is a frequent and crucial problem, especially in the medical domain where retrieving and labeling irregularities is often expensive. By combining the generative stability of a $\beta$-variational autoencoder (VAE) with the discriminative strengths of generative adversarial networks (GANs), we propose a novel model, $\beta$-VAEGAN. We investigate methods for composing anomaly scores based on the discriminative and reconstructive capabilities of our model. Existing work focuses on linear combinations of these components to determine if data is anomalous. We advance existing work by training a kernelized support vector machine (SVM) on the respective error components to also consider nonlinear relationships. This improves anomaly detection performance, while allowing faster optimization. Lastly, we use the deviations from the Gaussian prior of $\beta$-VAEGAN to form a novel anomaly score component. In comparison to state-of-the-art work, we improve the $F_1$ score during anomaly detection from 0.85 to 0.92 on the widely used MITBIH Arrhythmia Database.

The field of deep clustering combines deep learning and clustering to learn representations that improve both the learned representation and the performance of the considered clustering method. Most existing deep clustering methods are designed for a single clustering method, e.g., k-means, spectral clustering, or Gaussian mixture models, but it is well known that no clustering algorithm works best in all circumstances. Consensus clustering tries to alleviate the individual weaknesses of clustering algorithms by building a consensus between members of a clustering ensemble. Currently, there is no deep clustering method that can include multiple heterogeneous clustering algorithms in an ensemble to update representations and clusterings together. To close this gap, we introduce the idea of a consensus representation that maximizes the agreement between ensemble members. Further, we propose DECCS (Deep Embedded Clustering with Consensus representationS), a deep consensus clustering method that learns a consensus representation by enhancing the embedded space to such a degree that all ensemble members agree on a common clustering result. Our contributions are the following: (1) We introduce the idea of learning consensus representations for heterogeneous clusterings, a novel notion to approach consensus clustering. (2) We propose DECCS, the first deep clustering method that jointly improves the representation and clustering results of multiple heterogeneous clustering algorithms. (3) We show in experiments that learning a consensus representation with DECCS is outperforming several relevant baselines from deep clustering and consensus clustering. Our code can be found at https://gitlab.cs.univie.ac.at/lukas/deccs

Space-filling curves like the Hilbert-curve, Peano-curve and Z-order map natural or real numbers from a two or higher dimensional space to a one dimensional space preserving locality. They have numerous applications like search structures, computer graphics, numerical simulation, cryptographics and can be used to make various algorithms cache-oblivious. In this paper, we describe some details of the Hilbert-curve. We define the Hilbert-curve in terms of a finite automaton of Mealy-type which determines from the two-dimensional coordinate space the Hilbert order value and vice versa in a logarithmic number of steps. And we define a context-free grammar to generate the whole curve in a time which is linear in the number of generated coordinate/order value pairs, i.e. a constant time per coordinate pair or order value. We also review two different strategies which enable the generation of curves without the usual restriction to square-like grids where the side-length is a power of two. Finally, we elaborate on a few applications, namely matrix multiplication, Cholesky decomposition, the Floyd-Warshall algorithm, k-Means clustering, and the similarity join.