Weighted Consensus Clustering

Consensus clustering has emerged as an important extension of the classical clustering problem. We propose weighted consensus clustering, where each input clustering is weighted and the weights are determined in such a way that the final consensus clustering provides a better quality solution, in which clusters are better separated comparing to standard consensus clustering. Theoretically, we show that a reformulation of the wellknown L1 regularization LASSO problem is equivalent to the weight optimization of our weighted consensus clustering, and thus our approach provides sparse solutions which may resolve the difficult situation when the input clusterings diverge significantly. We also show that the weighted consensus clustering resolves the redundancy problem when many input clusterings correlate highly. Detailed algorithms are given. Experiments are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the weighted consensus clustering.