Regression Based Clustering by Deep Adversarial Learning

Abstract

Despite the great success, existing regression clustering methods based on shallow models are vulnerable due to: (1) They often pay no attention to the combination between learning representations and clustering, thus resulting in unsatisfactory clustering performance. (2) They ignore the relationship of data distribution and target distribution such that those methods are noise and illumination-change sensitive. (3) These nonlinear regression methods usually impose the hard constraint to minimize the mismatch between the discrete cluster assignment matrix and latent representations, which leads to over-fitting. In this paper, we utilize deep adversarial regression to tackle these problems and formulate regression based clustering by deep adversarial learning (RCDA). By seamlessly combining with the stacked autoencoder, the proposed model integrates learning deep nonlinear latent representation and clustering in a unified framework. Specifically, RCDA uses a kind of relax constraint between latent representations and continuous cluster assignment matrix to avoid over-fitting, and simultaneously utilizes the t-SNE algorithm and adversarial learning to analyze data distribution and target distribution so that improve representations learning. Experimental results on public benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves better performance than state-of-the-art clustering models in image clustering task. INDEX TERMS Unsupervised learning, image clustering, regression based clustering.