Evolutionary Multi-objective Clustering Over Multiple Conflicting Data Views

Abstract

Multi-view data analysis provides an effective means to integrate the distinct information sources which are inherent to many applications. Data clustering in a multi-view setting specifically aims to identify the most appropriate grouping for a collection of entities, where those entities (or their relationships) can be described from multiple perspectives. Leveraging recent advances in multi-objective clustering, we propose a new evolutionary method to tackle this challenge. Designed around a flexible and unbiased solution representation, together with strategies based on the minimum spanning tree and neighborhood relations, our algorithm optimizes multiple objectives simultaneously to effectively explore the space of candidate trade-offs between the data views. Through a series of experiments, we investigate the suitability of our proposal in the context of a bioinformatics application, clustering of plausible protein structures, and a diverse set of synthetic problems. The specific case of two data views is considered in this paper. The evaluation with respect to a variety of reference approaches demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in discovering high-quality partitions in a multiview setting. Robustness against unreliable data sources and the ability to automatically determine the number of clusters, are additional advantages evidenced by the results obtained.