Self-organizing subspace clustering for high-dimensional and multi-view data

A surge in the availability of data from multiple sources and modalities is correlated with advances in how to obtain, compress, store, transfer, and process large amounts of complex high-dimensional data. The clustering challenge increases with the growth of data dimensionality which decreases the discriminate power of the distance metrics. Subspace clustering aims to group data drawn from a union of subspaces. In such a way, there is a large number of state-of-the-art approaches and we divide them into families regarding the method used in the clustering. We introduce a soft subspace clustering algorithm, a Self-organizing Map (SOM) with a time-varying structure, to cluster data without any prior knowledge of the number of categories or of the neural network topology, both determined during the training process. The model also assigns proper relevancies (weights) to different dimensions, capturing from the learning process the influence of each dimension on uncovering clusters. We employ a number of real-world datasets to validate the model. This algorithm presents a competitive performance in a diverse range of contexts among them data mining, gene expression, multi-view, computer vision and text clustering problems which include high-dimensional data. Extensive experiments suggest that our method very often outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in all types of problems considered.