Random Projection for High Dimensional Data Clustering: A Cluster Ensemble Approach

We investigate how random projection can best be used for clustering high dimensional data. Random projection has been shown to have promising theoretical properties. In practice, however, we find that it results in highly unstable clustering performance. Our solution is to use random projection in a cluster ensemble approach. Empirical results show that the proposed approach achieves better and more robust clustering performance compared to not only single runs of random projection/clustering but also clustering with PCA, a traditional data reduction method for high dimensional data. To gain insights into the performance improvement obtained by our ensemble method, we analyze and identify the influence of the quality and the diversity of the individual clustering solutions on the final ensemble performance.