Demystifying Information-Theoretic Clustering

Abstract

We propose a novel method for clustering data which is grounded in information-theoretic principles and requires no parametric assumptions. Previous attempts to use information theory to define clusters in an assumption-free way are based on maximizing mutual information between data and cluster labels. We demonstrate that this intuition suffers from a fundamental conceptual flaw that causes clustering performance to deteriorate as the amount of data increases. Instead, we return to the axiomatic foundations of information theory to define a meaningful clustering measure based on the notion of consistency under coarse-graining for finite data.

Cite

Text

Ver Steeg et al. "Demystifying Information-Theoretic Clustering." International Conference on Machine Learning, 2014.

Markdown

[Ver Steeg et al. "Demystifying Information-Theoretic Clustering." International Conference on Machine Learning, 2014.](https://mlanthology.org/icml/2014/versteeg2014icml-demystifying/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{versteeg2014icml-demystifying,
  title     = {{Demystifying Information-Theoretic Clustering}},
  author    = {Ver Steeg, Greg and Galstyan, Aram and Sha, Fei and DeDeo, Simon},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Machine Learning},
  year      = {2014},
  pages     = {19-27},
  volume    = {32},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/icml/2014/versteeg2014icml-demystifying/}
}