Deep Goal-Oriented Clustering

Abstract

Clustering and prediction are two primary tasks in the fields of unsupervised and supervised learning, respectively. Although much of the recent advances in machine learning have been centered around those two tasks, the interdependent, mutually beneficial relationship between them is rarely explored. One could reasonably expect appropriately clustering the data would aid the downstream prediction task and, conversely, a better prediction performance for the downstream task could potentially inform a more appropriate clustering strategy. In this work, we focus on the latter part of this mutually beneficial relationship. To this end, we introduce Deep Goal-Oriented Clustering (DGC), a probabilistic framework that clusters the data by jointly using supervision via side-information and unsupervised modeling of the inherent data structure in an end-to-end fashion. We show the effectiveness of our model on a range of datasets by achieving prediction accuracies comparable to the state-of-the-art, while, more importantly in our setting, simultaneously learning congruent clustering strategies.

Publication
CoRR
Yifeng Shi
Yifeng Shi
Graduate Student in Computer Science

My research is in machine learning. So far I have been focusing on machine learning approaches for set-valued data and approaches for clustering with side-information.

Marc Niethammer
Marc Niethammer
Professor of Computer Science

My research interests include image registration, image segmentation, shape analysis, machine learning, and biomedical applications.

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