Non-exhaustive, Overlapping Clustering

Joyce Whang, Yangyang Hou, David Gleich, Inderjit Dhillon

Abstract:   Traditional clustering algorithms, such as K-Means, output a clustering that is disjoint and exhaustive, i.e., every single data point is assigned to exactly one cluster. However, in many real-world datasets, clusters can overlap and there are often outliers that do not belong to any cluster. While this is a well-recognized problem, most existing algorithms address either overlap or outlier detection and do not tackle the problem in a unified way. In this paper, we propose an intuitive objective function, which we call the NEO-K-Means (Non-Exhaustive, Overlapping K-Means) objective, that captures the issues of overlap and non-exhaustiveness in a unified manner. Our objective function can be viewed as a reformulation of the traditional K-Means objective, with easy-to-understand parameters that capture the degrees of overlap and non-exhaustiveness. By considering an extension to weighted kernel K-Means, we show that we can also apply our NEO-K-Means idea to overlapping community detection, which is an important task in network analysis. To optimize the NEO-K-Means objective, we develop not only fast iterative algorithms but also more sophisticated algorithms using low-rank semidefinite programming techniques. Our experimental results show that the new objective and algorithms are effective in finding ground-truth clusterings that have varied overlap and non-exhaustiveness.

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  • Non-exhaustive, Overlapping Clustering (pdf, software)
    J. Whang, Y. Hou, D. Gleich, I. Dhillon.
    IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) 41(11), pp. 2644–2659, August 2018.

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