A Clustering Ensemble Framework with Integration of Data Characteristics and Structure Information: A Graph Neural Networks Approach

Clustering ensemble is a research hotspot of data mining that aggregates several base clustering results to generate a single output clustering with improved robustness and stability. However, the validity of the ensemble result is usually affected by unreliability in the generation and integration of base clusterings. In order to address this issue, we develop a clustering ensemble framework viewed from graph neural networks that generates an ensemble result by integrating data characteristics and structure information. In this framework, we extract structure information from base clustering results of the data set by using a coupling affinity measure After that, we combine structure information with data characteristics by using a graph neural network (GNN) to learn their joint embeddings in latent space. Then, we employ a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to predict the final cluster assignment in the latent space. Finally, we construct the GNN and GMM as a unified optimization model to integrate the objectives of graph embedding and consensus clustering. Our framework can not only elegantly combine information in feature space and structure space, but can also achieve suitable representations for final cluster partitioning. Thus, it can produce an outstanding result. Experimental results on six synthetic benchmark data sets and six real world data sets show that the proposed framework yields a better performance compared to 12 reference algorithms that are developed based on either clustering ensemble architecture or a deep clustering strategy.