A Generative Block-Diagonal Model for Clustering

Junxiang Chen Northeastern University, Jennifer Dy
Proceedings of the 32nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, PMLR R14:415-424, 2016.

Abstract

Probabilistic mixture models are among the most important clustering methods. These models assume that the feature vectors of the samples can be described by a mixture of several components. Each of these components follows a distribution of a certain form. In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of interest and work in similarity-matrix-based methods. Rather than considering the feature vectors, these methods learn patterns by observing the similarity matrix that describes the pairwise relative similarity between each pair of samples. However, there are limited works in probabilistic mixture model for clustering with input data in the form of a similarity matrix. Observing this, we propose a generative model for clustering that finds the block-diagonal structure of the similarity matrix to ensure that the samples within the same cluster (diagonal block) are similar while the samples from different clusters (off-diagonal block) are less similar. In this model, we assume the elements in the similarity matrix follow one of beta distributions, depending on whether the element belongs to one of the diagonal blocks or to off-diagonal blocks. The assignment of the element to a block is determined by the cluster indicators that follow categorical distributions. Experiments on both synthetic and real data show that the performance of the proposed method is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-vR14-university16k, title = {A Generative Block-Diagonal Model for Clustering}, author = {University, Junxiang Chen Northeastern and Dy, Jennifer}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 32nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence}, pages = {415--424}, year = {2016}, editor = {Ihler, Alexander and Janzing, Dominik}, volume = {R14}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, month = {25--29 Jun}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mlresearch/r14/main/assets/university16k/university16k.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/r14/university16k.html}, abstract = {Probabilistic mixture models are among the most important clustering methods. These models assume that the feature vectors of the samples can be described by a mixture of several components. Each of these components follows a distribution of a certain form. In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of interest and work in similarity-matrix-based methods. Rather than considering the feature vectors, these methods learn patterns by observing the similarity matrix that describes the pairwise relative similarity between each pair of samples. However, there are limited works in probabilistic mixture model for clustering with input data in the form of a similarity matrix. Observing this, we propose a generative model for clustering that finds the block-diagonal structure of the similarity matrix to ensure that the samples within the same cluster (diagonal block) are similar while the samples from different clusters (off-diagonal block) are less similar. In this model, we assume the elements in the similarity matrix follow one of beta distributions, depending on whether the element belongs to one of the diagonal blocks or to off-diagonal blocks. The assignment of the element to a block is determined by the cluster indicators that follow categorical distributions. Experiments on both synthetic and real data show that the performance of the proposed method is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods.}, note = {Reissued by PMLR on 04 October 2026.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T A Generative Block-Diagonal Model for Clustering %A Junxiang Chen Northeastern University %A Jennifer Dy %B Proceedings of the 32nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2016 %E Alexander Ihler %E Dominik Janzing %F pmlr-vR14-university16k %I PMLR %P 415--424 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/r14/university16k.html %V R14 %X Probabilistic mixture models are among the most important clustering methods. These models assume that the feature vectors of the samples can be described by a mixture of several components. Each of these components follows a distribution of a certain form. In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of interest and work in similarity-matrix-based methods. Rather than considering the feature vectors, these methods learn patterns by observing the similarity matrix that describes the pairwise relative similarity between each pair of samples. However, there are limited works in probabilistic mixture model for clustering with input data in the form of a similarity matrix. Observing this, we propose a generative model for clustering that finds the block-diagonal structure of the similarity matrix to ensure that the samples within the same cluster (diagonal block) are similar while the samples from different clusters (off-diagonal block) are less similar. In this model, we assume the elements in the similarity matrix follow one of beta distributions, depending on whether the element belongs to one of the diagonal blocks or to off-diagonal blocks. The assignment of the element to a block is determined by the cluster indicators that follow categorical distributions. Experiments on both synthetic and real data show that the performance of the proposed method is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods. %Z Reissued by PMLR on 04 October 2026.
APA
University, J.C.N. & Dy, J.. (2016). A Generative Block-Diagonal Model for Clustering. Proceedings of the 32nd Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research R14:415-424 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/r14/university16k.html. Reissued by PMLR on 04 October 2026.

Related Material