Deep Clustering Using the Soft Silhouette Score: Towards Compact and Well-Separated Clusters

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Main Authors: Vardakas, Georgios, Papakostas, Ioannis, Likas, Aristidis
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Vardakas, Georgios
Papakostas, Ioannis
Likas, Aristidis
author_facet Vardakas, Georgios
Papakostas, Ioannis
Likas, Aristidis
contents Unsupervised learning has gained prominence in the big data era, offering a means to extract valuable insights from unlabeled datasets. Deep clustering has emerged as an important unsupervised category, aiming to exploit the non-linear mapping capabilities of neural networks in order to enhance clustering performance. The majority of deep clustering literature focuses on minimizing the inner-cluster variability in some embedded space while keeping the learned representation consistent with the original high-dimensional dataset. In this work, we propose soft silhoutte, a probabilistic formulation of the silhouette coefficient. Soft silhouette rewards compact and distinctly separated clustering solutions like the conventional silhouette coefficient. When optimized within a deep clustering framework, soft silhouette guides the learned representations towards forming compact and well-separated clusters. In addition, we introduce an autoencoder-based deep learning architecture that is suitable for optimizing the soft silhouette objective function. The proposed deep clustering method has been tested and compared with several well-studied deep clustering methods on various benchmark datasets, yielding very satisfactory clustering results.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_00608
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Clustering Using the Soft Silhouette Score: Towards Compact and Well-Separated Clusters
Vardakas, Georgios
Papakostas, Ioannis
Likas, Aristidis
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Unsupervised learning has gained prominence in the big data era, offering a means to extract valuable insights from unlabeled datasets. Deep clustering has emerged as an important unsupervised category, aiming to exploit the non-linear mapping capabilities of neural networks in order to enhance clustering performance. The majority of deep clustering literature focuses on minimizing the inner-cluster variability in some embedded space while keeping the learned representation consistent with the original high-dimensional dataset. In this work, we propose soft silhoutte, a probabilistic formulation of the silhouette coefficient. Soft silhouette rewards compact and distinctly separated clustering solutions like the conventional silhouette coefficient. When optimized within a deep clustering framework, soft silhouette guides the learned representations towards forming compact and well-separated clusters. In addition, we introduce an autoencoder-based deep learning architecture that is suitable for optimizing the soft silhouette objective function. The proposed deep clustering method has been tested and compared with several well-studied deep clustering methods on various benchmark datasets, yielding very satisfactory clustering results.
title Deep Clustering Using the Soft Silhouette Score: Towards Compact and Well-Separated Clusters
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00608