Tag Archives: Clustering

A new clustering algorithm based on swarm intelligence that is alleged to require no parameterization

June 29, 2023 10:12 ,

Michael C. Thrun, Alfred Ultsch, Swarm intelligence for self-organized clustering, . Artificial Intelligence, Volume 290, 2021, DOI: 10.1016/j.artint.2020.103237.

Algorithms implementing populations of agents which interact with one another and sense their environment may exhibit emergent behavior such as self-organization and swarm intelligence. Here a swarm system, called Databionic swarm (DBS), is introduced which is able to adapt itself to structures of high-dimensional data characterized by distance and/or density-based structures in the data space. By exploiting the interrelations of swarm intelligence, self-organization and emergence, DBS serves as an alternative approach to the optimization of a global objective function in the task of clustering. The swarm omits the usage of a global objective function and is parameter-free because it searches for the Nash equilibrium during its annealing process. To our knowledge, DBS is the first swarm combining these approaches. Its clustering can outperform common clustering methods such as K-means, PAM, single linkage, spectral clustering, model-based clustering, and Ward, if no prior knowledge about the data is available. A central problem in clustering is the correct estimation of the number of clusters. This is addressed by a DBS visualization called topographic map which allows assessing the number of clusters. It is known that all clustering algorithms construct clusters, irrespective of the data set contains clusters or not. In contrast to most other clustering algorithms, the topographic map identifies, that clustering of the data is meaningless if the data contains no (natural) clusters. The performance of DBS is demonstrated on a set of benchmark data, which are constructed to pose difficult clustering problems and in two real-world applications.

Posted in: Artificial Intelligence , Tagged: ,

A fast method to cluster networks that include both randomness and structure, with a nice summary of existing clustering algorithms

June 26, 2023 11:47 ,

Blondel V.D., Guillaume J.-L., Lambiotte R., Lefebvre E., Fast unfolding of communities in large networks, . Stat. Mech. Theory Exp., 2008 (10) (2008), Article P10008, DOI: 10.1088/1742-5468/2008/10/P10008.

We propose a simple method to extract the community structure of large networks. Our method is a heuristic method that is based on modularity optimization. It is shown to outperform all other known community detection methods in terms of computation time. Moreover, the quality of the communities detected is very good, as measured by the so-called modularity. This is shown first by identifying language communities in a Belgian mobile phone network of 2 million customers and by analysing a web graph of 118 million nodes and more than one billion links. The accuracy of our algorithm is also verified on ad hoc modular networks.

Posted in: Graph theory , Tagged: ,

Using bad results during policy iteration, and not only good ones, to improve the learning process

August 10, 2017 10:00 ,

A. Colomé and C. Torras, Dual REPS: A Generalization of Relative Entropy Policy Search Exploiting Bad Experiences, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol. 33, no. 4, pp. 978-985, DOI: 10.1109/TRO.2017.2679202.

Policy search (PS) algorithms are widely used for their simplicity and effectiveness in finding solutions for robotic problems. However, most current PS algorithms derive policies by statistically fitting the data from the best experiments only. This means that experiments yielding a poor performance are usually discarded or given too little influence on the policy update. In this paper, we propose a generalization of the relative entropy policy search (REPS) algorithm that takes bad experiences into consideration when computing a policy. The proposed approach, named dual REPS (DREPS) following the philosophical interpretation of the duality between good and bad, finds clusters of experimental data yielding a poor behavior and adds them to the optimization problem as a repulsive constraint. Thus, considering that there is a duality between good and bad data samples, both are taken into account in the stochastic search for a policy. Additionally, a cluster with the best samples may be included as an attractor to enforce faster convergence to a single optimal solution in multimodal problems. We first tested our proposed approach in a simulated reinforcement learning setting and found that DREPS considerably speeds up the learning process, especially during the early optimization steps and in cases where other approaches get trapped in between several alternative maxima. Further experiments in which a real robot had to learn a task with a multimodal reward function confirm the advantages of our proposed approach with respect to REPS.

Posted in: Applications of reinforcement learning to robots , Tagged: ,

Clustering in hypergraphs

August 10, 2017 09:45 ,

P. Purkait, T. J. Chin, A. Sadri and D. Suter, Clustering with Hypergraphs: The Case for Large Hyperedges, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, vol. 39, no. 9, pp. 1697-1711, DOI: 10.1109/TPAMI.2016.2614980.

The extension of conventional clustering to hypergraph clustering, which involves higher order similarities instead of pairwise similarities, is increasingly gaining attention in computer vision. This is due to the fact that many clustering problems require an affinity measure that must involve a subset of data of size more than two. In the context of hypergraph clustering, the calculation of such higher order similarities on data subsets gives rise to hyperedges. Almost all previous work on hypergraph clustering in computer vision, however, has considered the smallest possible hyperedge size, due to a lack of study into the potential benefits of large hyperedges and effective algorithms to generate them. In this paper, we show that large hyperedges are better from both a theoretical and an empirical standpoint. We then propose a novel guided sampling strategy for large hyperedges, based on the concept of random cluster models. Our method can generate large pure hyperedges that significantly improve grouping accuracy without exponential increases in sampling costs. We demonstrate the efficacy of our technique on various higher-order grouping problems. In particular, we show that our approach improves the accuracy and efficiency of motion segmentation from dense, long-term, trajectories.

Posted in: Graph theory , Tagged: ,

An interesting soft-partition method based on hierarchical graphs (trees, actually) applied to topic detection in documents

August 9, 2017 09:37 ,

Peixian Chen, Nevin L. Zhang, Tengfei Liu, Leonard K.M. Poon, Zhourong Chen, Farhan Khawar, Latent tree models for hierarchical topic detection, Artificial Intelligence, Volume 250, 2017, Pages 105-124, DOI: 10.1016/j.artint.2017.06.004.

We present a novel method for hierarchical topic detection where topics are obtained by clustering documents in multiple ways. Specifically, we model document collections using a class of graphical models called hierarchical latent tree models (HLTMs). The variables at the bottom level of an HLTM are observed binary variables that represent the presence/absence of words in a document. The variables at other levels are binary latent variables that represent word co-occurrence patterns or co-occurrences of such patterns. Each latent variable gives a soft partition of the documents, and document clusters in the partitions are interpreted as topics. Latent variables at high levels of the hierarchy capture long-range word co-occurrence patterns and hence give thematically more general topics, while those at low levels of the hierarchy capture short-range word co-occurrence patterns and give thematically more specific topics. In comparison with LDA-based methods, a key advantage of the new method is that it represents co-occurrence patterns explicitly using model structures. Extensive empirical results show that the new method significantly outperforms the LDA-based methods in term of model quality and meaningfulness of topics and topic hierarchies.

Posted in: Artificial Intelligence , Tagged: , ,

A new method of clustering of data with many advantages w.r.t. others

June 22, 2017 08:44 ,

A. Sharma, K. A. Boroevich, D. Shigemizu, Y. Kamatani, M. Kubo and T. Tsunoda, “Hierarchical Maximum Likelihood Clustering Approach,” in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 64, no. 1, pp. 112-122, Jan. 2017. DOI: 10.1109/TBME.2016.2542212.

In this paper, we focused on developing a clustering approach for biological data. In many biological analyses, such as multiomics data analysis and genome-wide association studies analysis, it is crucial to find groups of data belonging to subtypes of diseases or tumors. Methods: Conventionally, the k-means clustering algorithm is overwhelmingly applied in many areas including biological sciences. There are, however, several alternative clustering algorithms that can be applied, including support vector clustering. In this paper, taking into consideration the nature of biological data, we propose a maximum likelihood clustering scheme based on a hierarchical framework. Results: This method can perform clustering even when the data belonging to different groups overlap. It can also perform clustering when the number of samples is lower than the data dimensionality. Conclusion: The proposed scheme is free from selecting initial settings to begin the search process. In addition, it does not require the computation of the first and second derivative of likelihood functions, as is required by many other maximum likelihood-based methods. Significance: This algorithm uses distribution and centroid information to cluster a sample and was applied to biological data. A MATLAB implementation of this method can be downloaded from the web link http://www.riken.jp/en/research/labs/ims/med_sci_math/.

Posted in: Machine learning , Tagged: , ,