A General Transfer Learning-based Gaussian Mixture Model for Clustering

Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is a well-known model-based approach for data clustering. However, when the data samples are insufficient, the classical GMM-based clustering algorithms are not effective anymore. Referring to the idea of transfer clustering methods, this paper proposes a general transfer GMM-based clustering framework, which employs the important knowledge extracted from some known source domain to guide and improve the clustering on the target domain with small-scale data. Specifically, three traditional GMM-based clustering approaches are extended to the corresponding transfer clustering versions. Furthermore, to avoid the negative transfer problem, maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) is introduced to search the most matched source domain to provide more positive guidance for data clustering on the target domain. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency of the presented framework compared with several existing transfer clustering algorithms.