Transfer Clustering Using a Multiple Kernel Metric Learned Under Multi-Instance Weak Supervision

Article Type

Research Article

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence

Abstract

Multiple kernel clustering methods have been quite successful recently especially concerning the multi-view clustering of complex datasets. These methods simultaneously learn a multiple kernel metric while clustering in an unsupervised setting. With the motivation that some minimal supervision can potentially increase their effectiveness, we propose a Multiple Kernel Transfer Clustering (MKTC) method that can be described in terms of two tasks: a source task, where the multiple kernel metric is learned, and a target task where the multiple kernel metric is transferred to partition a dataset. In the source task, we create a weakly supervised multi-instance subset of the dataset, where a set of data instances are together provided some labels. We put forth a Multiple Kernel Multi-Instance $k$-Means (MKMIKM) method to simultaneously cluster the multi-instance subset while also learning a multiple kernel metric under weak supervision. In the target task, MKTC transfers the multiple kernel metric learned by MKMIKM to perform unsupervised single-instance clustering of the entire dataset in a single step. The advantage of using a multi-instance setup for the source task is that it requires reduced labeling effort to guide the learning of the multiple kernel metric. Our formulations lead to a significantly lower computational cost in comparison to the state-of-the-art multiple kernel clustering algorithms, making them more applicable to larger datasets. Experiments over benchmark computer vision datasets suggest that MKTC can achieve significant improvements in clustering performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art unsupervised multiple-kernel clustering methods and other transfer clustering methods.

First Page

828

Last Page

838

DOI

10.1109/TETCI.2021.3110526

Publication Date

8-1-2022

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