Multi-Objective Cluster Ensemble based on Filter Refinement Scheme

Cluster ensemble improves the robustness and stability of clustering performances by utilizing multiple solutions. Although traditional cluster ensemble methods have achieved promising performances, they are not adaptive enough to cope with data sets that have multiple levels of complexities. Besides, these methods may contain noisy and redundancy members which have negative effects. To mitigate the above issues, in this paper, we propose a multi-objective filter refinement scheme (MOFRS). First, we perform various clustering methods on different representations of data to generate diverse solutions. Second, we propose a solution filter to select a proper method and reduce the number of initial partitions for a given data set. Third, four stability indices are designed to split instances into stable and unstable groups. Fourth, objective functions based on diversity and quality are utilized to quantify the goodness of base clustering solutions. Finally, we design an improvement oriented multi-objective evolutionary algorithm to optimize these objective functions. Extensive experimental results conducted on 27 real-world data sets show that MOFRS outperforms most cluster ensemble selection methods, and achieves statistically significant improvements, compared with full ensemble methods.