Similarity-based Combination of Multiple Clusterings

Consensus clustering refers to combining multiple clusterings over a common set of objects into a single consolidated partition. After introducing the distribution-based view of partitions, we propose a series of entropy-based distance functions for comparing various partitions. Given a candidate partition set, consensus clustering is then formalized as an optimization problem of searching for a centroid partition with the smallest distance to that set. In addition to directly selecting the local centroid candidate, we also present two combining methods for the global centroid based on the new similarity determined by the whole candidate set. The centroid partition is likely to be top/middle-ranked in terms of closeness to the true partition. Finally we evaluate its effectiveness on both artificial and real datasets, with candidates from either the full space or the subspace.