Maximin Separation Probability Clustering

Abstract

This paper proposes a new approach for discriminative clustering. The intuition is, for a good clustering, one should be able to learn a classifier from the clustering labels with high generalization accuracy. Thus we define a novel metric to evaluate the quality of a clustering labeling, named Minimum Separation Probability (MSP), which is a lower bound of the generalization accuracy of a classifier learnt from the clustering labeling. We take MSP as the objective to maximize and propose our approach Maximin Separation Probability Clustering (MSPC), which has several attractive properties, such as invariance to anisotropic feature scaling and intuitive probabilistic explanation for clustering quality. We present three efficient optimization strategies for MSPC, and analyze their interesting connections to existing clustering approaches, such as maximum margin clustering (MMC) and discriminative k-means. Empirical results on real world data sets verify that MSP is a robust and effective clustering quality measure. It is also shown that the proposed algorithms compare favorably to state-of-the-art clustering algorithms in both accuracy and efficiency.