A Probabilistic Model Using Information Theoretic Measures for Cluster Ensembles

This paper presents a probabilistic model for combining cluster ensembles utilizing information theoretic measures. Starting from a co-association matrix which summarizes the ensemble, we extract a set of association distributions, which are modelled as discrete probability distributions of the object labels, conditional on each data object. The key objectives are, first, to model the associations of neighboring data objects, and second, to allow for the manipulation of the defined probability distributions using statistical and information theoretic means. A Jensen-Shannon Divergence based Clustering Combination (JSDCC) method is proposed. The method selects cluster prototypes from the set of association distributions based on entropy maximization and maximization of the generalized JS divergence among the selected prototypes. The method proceeds by grouping association distributions by minimizing their JS divergences to the selected prototypes. By aggregating the grouped association distributions, we can represent empirical cluster conditional probability distributions of the object labels, for each of the combined clusters. Finally, data objects are assigned to their most likely clusters, and their cluster assignment probabilities are estimated. Experiments are performed to assess the presented method and compare its performance with other alternative co-association based methods.