Descriptive Clustering: ILP and CP Formulations with Applications

Abstract

In many settings just finding a good clustering is insufficient and an explanation of the clustering is required. If the features used to perform the clustering are interpretable then methods such as conceptual clustering can be used. However, in many applications this is not the case particularly for image, graph and other complex data. Here we explore the setting where a set of interpretable discrete tags for each instance is available. We formulate the descriptive clustering problem as a bi-objective optimization to simultaneously find compact clusters using the features and to describe them using the tags. We present our formulation in a declarative platform and show it can be integrated into a standard iterative algorithm to find all Pareto optimal solutions to the two objectives. Preliminary results demonstrate the utility of our approach on real data sets for images and electronic health care records and that it outperforms single objective and multi-view clustering baselines.