Title: Twin Learning for Similarity and Clustering: A Unified Kernel Approach,
Abstract: Many similarity-based clustering methods work in two separate steps including
similarity matrix computation and subsequent spectral clustering. However,
similarity measurement is challenging because it is usually impacted by many
factors, e.g., the choice of similarity metric, neighborhood size, scale of
data, noise and outliers. Thus the learned similarity matrix is often not
suitable, let alone optimal, for the subsequent clustering. In addition,
nonlinear similarity often exists in many real world data which, however, has
not been effectively considered by most existing methods. To tackle these two
challenges, we propose a model to simultaneously learn cluster indicator matrix
and similarity information in kernel spaces in a principled way. We show
theoretical relationships to kernel k-means, k-means, and spectral clustering
methods. Then, to address the practical issue of how to select the most
suitable kernel for a particular clustering task, we further extend our model
with a multiple kernel learning ability. With this joint model, we can
automatically accomplish three subtasks of finding the best cluster indicator
matrix, the most accurate similarity relations and the optimal combination of
multiple kernels. By leveraging the interactions between these three subtasks
in a joint framework, each subtask can be iteratively boosted by using the
results of the others towards an overall optimal solution. Extensive
experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.