A Probabilistic Approach to Constrained Deep Clustering

Laura Manduchi, Kieran Chin-Cheong, Holger Michel, Sven Wellmann, Julia E Vogt

Keywords: constrained clustering, semi-supervised representation learning, generative model, deep learning

Abstract: Clustering with constraints has gained significant attention in the field of semi-supervised machine learning as it can leverage partial prior information on a growing amount of unlabelled data. Following recent advances in deep generative models, we derive a novel probabilistic approach to constrained clustering that can be trained efficiently in the framework of stochastic gradient variational Bayes. In contrast to existing approaches, our model (CVaDE) uncovers the underlying distribution of the data conditioned on prior clustering preferences, expressed as pairwise constraints. The inclusion of such constraints allows the user to guide the clustering process towards a desirable partition of the data by indicating which samples should or should not belong to the same class. We provide extensive experiments to demonstrate that CVaDE shows superior clustering performances and robustness compared to state-of-the-art deep constrained clustering methods in a variety of data sets. We further demonstrate the usefulness of our approach on challenging real-world medical applications and face image generation.

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One-sentence Summary: We present a novel deep constrained clustering method, CVaDE, that incorporates clustering preferences in the form of pairwise constraints, with varying degrees of certainty.

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