Multiple Consensuses Clustering by Iterative Merging/Splitting of Clustering Patterns
Résumé
The existence of many clustering algorithms with variable performance on each dataset made the clustering task difficult. Consensus
clustering tries to solve this problem by combining the partitions generated by different algorithms to build a new solution that is more stable and achieves better results. In this work, we propose a new consensus method that, unlike others, give more insight on the relations between the different partitions in the clusterings ensemble, by using the frequent closed itemsets technique, usually used for association rules discovery. Instead of generating one consensus, our method generates multiple consensuses based on varying the number of base clusterings, and links these solutions in a hierarchical representation that eases the selection of the best clustering. This hierarchical view also provides an analysis tool, for example to discover strong clusters or outlier instances.