Clustering Based on Supervised Learning of Exemplar Discriminative Information

In machine learning and data mining applications, clustering is a critical task for knowledge discovery that attract attentions from large quantities of researchers. Generally, with the help of label information, supervised learning methods have more flexible structure and better result than unsupervised learning. However, supervised learning is infeasible for clustering task. In this paper, to fill the gap between clustering and supervised learning, the proposed clustering methods introduce the exemplars discriminative information into a supervised learning. To build the effective objective function, a strategy for reducing intracluster distance and increasing intercluster distance is introduced to form a unified optimization objective function. With initially setting the clustering centers, the data that near the centers are selected as exemplars to indicate the ground truth of different classes. Discriminative learning is then introduced to learn the partition hyperplane and classify all the data into different classes. New clustering centers are calculated for selecting new exemplars alternately. Using the proposed algorithms, the unsupervised $K$ -means clustering problem is effectively solved from the perceptive of optimization. Feature mapping is also introduced to improve the performance by reducing the intercluster distance. A novel framework for exploring discriminative information from unsupervised data is provided. The proposed algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art approaches on a wide range of benchmark datasets in terms of accuracy.