Interpretable Clustering via Multi-Polytope Machines

Connor Lawless, Jayant Kalagnanam, Lam M. Nguyen, Dzung Phan, Chandra Reddy

[AAAI-22] Main Track
Abstract: Clustering is a popular unsupervised learning tool often used to discover groups within a larger population such as customer segments, or patient subtypes. However, despite its use as a tool for subgroup discovery and description - few state-of-the-art algorithms provide any rationale or description behind the clusters found. We propose a novel approach for interpretable clustering that both clusters data points and constructs polytopes around the discovered clusters to explain them. Our framework allows for additional constraints on the polytopes - including ensuring that the hyperplanes constructing the polytope are axis-parallel or sparse with integer coefficients. We formulate the problem of constructing clusters via polytopes as a Mixed-Integer Non-Linear Program (MINLP). To solve our formulation we propose a two phase approach where we first initialize clusters and polytopes using alternating minimization, and then use coordinate descent to boost clustering performance. We benchmark our approach on a suite of synthetic and real world clustering problems, where our algorithm outperforms state of the art interpretable and non-interpretable clustering algorithms.

Introduction Video

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    Fri, February 25 5:00 PM - 6:45 PM (+00:00)
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    Mon, February 28 12:45 AM - 2:30 AM (+00:00)
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