Clustering with a Reject Option: Interactive Clustering as Bayesian Prior Elicitation
Abstract
A good clustering can help a data analyst to explore and understand a data set, but what constitutes a good clustering may depend on domain-specific and application-specific criteria. These criteria can be difficult to formalize, even when it is easy for an analyst to know a good clustering when they see one. We present a new approach to interactive clustering for data exploration called TINDER, based on a particularly simple feedback mechanism, in which an analyst can reject a given clustering and request a new one, which is chosen to be different from the previous clustering while fitting the data well. We formalize this interaction in a Bayesian framework as a method for prior elicitation, in which each different clustering is produced by a prior distribution that is modified to discourage previously rejected clusterings. We show that TINDER successfully produces a diverse set of clusterings, each of equivalent quality, that are much more diverse than would be obtained by randomized restarts.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1606.05896,
title = {Clustering with a Reject Option: Interactive Clustering as Bayesian Prior Elicitation},
author = {Akash Srivastava and James Zou and Ryan P. Adams and Charles Sutton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.05896},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
presented at 2016 ICML Workshop on Human Interpretability in Machine Learning (WHI 2016), New York, NY