Overlapping Clustering Models, and One (class) SVM to Bind Them All

Xueyu Mao; Purnamrita Sarkar; Deepayan Chakrabarti

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arXiv · 1806.06945

Overlapping Clustering Models, and One (class) SVM to Bind Them All

Xueyu Mao·Purnamrita Sarkar·Deepayan Chakrabarti

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Abstract

People belong to multiple communities, words belong to multiple topics, and books cover multiple genres; overlapping clusters are commonplace. Many existing overlapping clustering methods model each person (or word, or book) as a non-negative weighted combination of "exemplars" who belong solely to one community, with some small noise. Geometrically, each person is a point on a cone whose corners are these exemplars. This basic form encompasses the widely used Mixed Membership Stochastic Blockmodel of networks (Airoldi et al., 2008) and its degree-corrected variants (Jin et al., 2017), as well as topic models such as LDA (Blei et al., 2003). We show that a simple one-class SVM yields provably consistent parameter inference for all such models, and scales to large datasets. Experimental results on several simulated and real datasets show our algorithm (called SVM-cone) is both accurate and scalable.

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Xueyu Mao, Purnamrita Sarkar, Deepayan Chakrabarti. 2018-06-18. Overlapping Clustering Models, and One (class) SVM to Bind Them All. https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.06945

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