Deep Unsupervised Clustering Using Mixture of Autoencoders

Abstract

Unsupervised clustering is one of the most fundamental challenges in machine learning. A popular hypothesis is that data are generated from a union of low-dimensional nonlinear manifolds; thus an approach to clustering is identifying and separating these manifolds. In this paper, we present a novel approach to solve this problem by using a mixture of autoencoders. Our model consists of two parts: 1) a collection of autoencoders where each autoencoder learns the underlying manifold of a group of similar objects, and 2) a mixture assignment neural network, which takes the concatenated latent vectors from the autoencoders as input and infers the distribution over clusters. By jointly optimizing the two parts, we simultaneously assign data to clusters and learn the underlying manifolds of each cluster.Part of this work was done when Dejiao Zhang was doing an internship at Technicolor Research. Both Dejiao Zhang and Laura Balzano’s participations were funded by DARPA-16-43-D3M-FP-037. Both Yifan Sun and Brian Eriksson's participation occurred while also at Technicolor Research.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145190/1/mixae_arxiv_submit.pdfDescription of mixae_arxiv_submit.pdf : Main tech repor