Contrastive Ensemble Clustering

Ensemble clustering aims to combine different base clusterings into a better clustering than that of the individual one. In general, a co-association matrix depicting the pairwise affinity between different data samples is constructed by average fusion or weighted fusion of the connective matrices from multiple base clusterings. Despite the significant success, the existing works fail to capture the global structure information from multiple noisy connective matrices. Meanwhile, the locality property of the resulting representation matrix could not be explicitly preserved. In this article, we propose a novel contrastive ensemble clustering (CEC) method. Specifically, a consensus mapping model is designed for the discovery of the latent representation from the noisy observations with distinct confidences. Furthermore, a contrastive regularizer is dexterously formulated to refine the latent representation while preserving its locality property. Extensive experiments conducted on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed CEC method. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to explore the potential of latent representation learning and contrastive components for the ensemble clustering task.