Meta-cluster Based Consensus Clustering with Local Weighting and Random Walking

Consensus clustering has in recent years become one of the most popular topics in the clustering research, due to its promising ability in combining multiple weak base clusterings into a strong consensus result. In this paper, we aim to deal with three challenging issues in consensus clustering, i.e., the high-order integration issue, the local reliability issue, and the efficiency issue. Specifically, we present a new consensus clustering approach termed meta-cluster based consensus clustering with local weighting and random walking (MC\(^3\)LR). To ensure the computational efficiency, we use the base clusters as the graph nodes to construct a cluster-wise similarity graph. Then, we perform random walks on the cluster-wise similarity graph to explore its high-order structural information, based on which a new cluster-wise similarity measure is derived. To tackle the local reliability issue, all of the base clusters are assessed and weighted according to the ensemble-driven cluster index (ECI). Finally, a locally weighted meta-clustering process is performed on the newly obtained cluster-wise similarity measure to build the consensus clustering result. Experimental results on multiple datasets have shown the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.