Symbiotic Evolutionary Subspace Clustering (S-ESC)

Abstract

Subspace clustering identifies the attribute support for each cluster as well as identifying the location and number of clusters. In the most general case, attributes associated with each cluster could be unique. A multi-objective evolutionary method is proposed to identify the unique attribute support of each cluster while detecting its data instances. The proposed algorithm, Symbiotic Evolutionary Subspace Clustering (S-ESC) borrows from symbiosis in the sense that each clustering solution is defined in terms of a host, which is formed by a number of co-evolved cluster centroids (or symbionts). Symbionts define clusters and therefore attribute subspaces, whereas hosts define sets of clusters to constitute a non-degenerate clustering solution. The symbiotic representation of S-ESC is the key to making it scalable to high-dimensional datasets, while a subsampling process makes it scalable to large-scale datasets. Performance of the S-ESC algorithm was found to be robust across a common parameterization utilized throughout.