Document clustering with cluster refinement and model selection capabilities

Xin Liu, Yihong Gong, Wei Xu, Shenghuo Zhu

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a document clustering method that strives to achieve: (1) a high accuracy of document clustering, and (2) the capability of estimating the number of clusters in the document corpus (i.e. the model selection capability). To accurately cluster the given document corpus, we employ a richer feature set to represent each document, and use the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) together with the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to conduct an initial document clustering. From this initial result, we identify a set of discriminative featuresfor each cluster, and refine the initially obtained document clusters by voting on the cluster label of each document using this discriminative feature set. This self-refinement process of discriminative feature identification and cluster label voting is iteratively applied until the convergence of document clusters. On the other hand, the model selection capability is achieved by introducing randomness in the cluster initialization stage, and then discovering a value C for the number of clusters N by which running the document clustering process for a fixed number of times yields sufficiently similar results. Performance evaluations exhibit clear superiority of the proposed method with its improved document clustering and model selection accuracies. The evaluations also demonstrate how each feature as well as the cluster refinement process contribute to the document clustering accuracy.