DeepECT: The Deep Embedded Cluster Tree

Author(s)
Dominik Mautz, Claudia Plant, Christian Böhm
Abstract

The idea of combining the high representational power of deep learning techniques with clustering methods has gained much attention in recent years. Optimizing a clustering objective and the dataset representation simultaneously has been shown to be advantageous over separately optimizing them. So far, however, all proposed methods have been using a flat clustering strategy, with the actual number of clusters known a priori. In this paper, we propose the Deep Embedded Cluster Tree (DeepECT), the first divisive hierarchical embedded clustering method. The cluster tree does not need to know the actual number of clusters during optimization. Instead, the level of detail to be analyzed can be chosen afterward and for each sub-tree separately. An optional data-augmentation-based extension allows DeepECT to ignore prior-known invariances of the dataset, such as affine transformations in image data. We evaluate and show the advantages of DeepECT in extensive experiments.

Organisation(s)
Research Network Data Science, Research Group Data Mining and Machine Learning
External organisation(s)
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Journal
Data Science and Engineering
Volume
5
Pages
419-432
No. of pages
14
ISSN
2364-1185
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41019-020-00134-0
Publication date
12-2020
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
102033 Data mining
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Computer Science Applications, Computational Mechanics
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/deepect-the-deep-embedded-cluster-tree(c175a5ff-ad08-4fa6-bd59-0dbfc116b458).html