A Nonparametric Deep Generative Model for Multimanifold Clustering

IEEE Trans Cybern. 2019 Jul;49(7):2664-2677. doi: 10.1109/TCYB.2018.2832171. Epub 2018 May 16.

Abstract

Multimanifold clustering separates data points approximately lying on a union of submanifolds into several clusters. In this paper, we propose a new nonparametric Bayesian model to handle the manifold data structure. In our framework, we first model the manifold mapping function between Euclidean space and topological space by applying a deep neural network, and then construct the corresponding generation process of multiple manifold data. To solve the posterior approximation problem, in the optimization procedure, we apply a variational auto-encoder-based optimization algorithm. Especially, as the manifold algorithm has poor performance on the real dataset where nonmanifold and manifold clusters are appearing simultaneously, we expand our proposed manifold algorithm by integrating it with the original Dirichlet process mixture model. Experimental results have been carried out to demonstrate the state-of-the-art clustering performance.