The Effect of Evidence Transfer on Latent Feature Relevance for Clustering

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The Effect of Evidence Transfer on Latent Feature Relevance for Clustering

Journal Title: Informatics - Year 2019, Vol 6, Issue 2

Abstract

Evidence transfer for clustering is a deep learning method that manipulates the latent representations of an autoencoder according to external categorical evidence with the effect of improving a clustering outcome. Evidence transfer’s application on clustering is designed to be robust when introduced with a low quality of evidence, while increasing the effectiveness of the clustering accuracy during relevant corresponding evidence. We interpret the effects of evidence transfer on the latent representation of an autoencoder by comparing our method to the information bottleneck method. Information bottleneck is an optimisation problem of finding the best tradeoff between maximising the mutual information of data representations and a task outcome while at the same time being effective in compressing the original data source. We posit that the evidence transfer method has essentially the same objective regarding the latent representations produced by an autoencoder. We verify our hypothesis using information theoretic metrics from feature selection in order to perform an empirical analysis over the information that is carried through the bottleneck of the latent space. We use the relevance metric to compare the overall mutual information between the latent representations and the ground truth labels before and after their incremental manipulation, as well as, to study the effects of evidence transfer regarding the significance of each latent feature.

Authors and Affiliations

Athanasios Davvetas, Iraklis A. Klampanos, Spiros Skiadopoulos and Vangelis Karkaletsis

Keywords

deep neural networks; evidence transfer; relevance; feature selection; information bottleneck; latent features; deep learning

EP ID EP44182
DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/informatics6020017
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