Extending Consensus Clustering to Explore Multiple Clustering Views

Consensus clustering has emerged as an important extension of the classical clustering problem. Given a set of input clusterings of a given dataset, consensus clustering aims to find a single final clustering which is a better fit in some sense than the existing clusterings. There is a significant drawback in generating a single consensus clustering since different input clusterings could differ significantly. In this paper, we develop a new framework, called Multiple Consensus Clustering (MCC), to explore multiple clustering views of a given dataset from a set of input clusterings. Instead of generating a single consensus, MCC organizes the different input clusterings into a hierarchical tree structure and allows for interactive exploration of multiple clustering solutions. A dynamic programming algorithm is proposed to obtain a flat partition from the hierarchical tree using the modularity measure. Multiple consensuses are finally obtained by applying consensus clustering algorithms to each cluster of the partition. Extensive experimental results on 11 real world data sets and a case study on a Protein-Protein Interaction (PPI) data set demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.