Shuai Yang

Shuai Yang, Wenqi Zhu, Yuesheng Zhu

Subspace clustering refers to the problem of clustering high-dimensional data into a union of low-dimensional subspaces. Current subspace clustering approaches are usually based on a two-stage framework. In the first stage, an affinity matrix is generated from data. In the second one, spectral clustering is applied on the affinity matrix. However, the affinity matrix produced by two-stage methods cannot fully reveal the similarity between data points from the same subspace (intra-subspace similarity), resulting in inaccurate clustering. Besides, most approaches fail to solve large-scale clustering problems due to poor efficiency. In this paper, we first propose a new scalable sparse method called Iterative Maximum Correlation (IMC) to learn the affinity matrix from data. Then we develop Piecewise Correlation Estimation (PCE) to densify the intra-subspace similarity produced by IMC. Finally we extend our work into a Sparse-Dense Subspace Clustering (SDSC) framework with a dense stage to optimize the affinity matrix for two-stage methods. We show that IMC is efficient when clustering large-scale data, and PCE ensures better performance for IMC. We show the universality of our SDSC framework as well. Experiments on several data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. Moreover, we are the first one to apply densification on affinity matrix before spectral clustering, and SDSC constitutes the first attempt to build a universal three-stage subspace clustering framework.

Shuai Yang, Wenqi Zhu, Yuesheng Zhu

Subspace clustering aims to cluster unlabeled data that lies in a union of low-dimensional linear subspaces. Deep subspace clustering approaches based on auto-encoders have become very popular to solve subspace clustering problems. However, the training of current deep methods converges slowly, which is much less efficient than traditional approaches. We propose a Residual Encoder-Decoder network for deep Subspace Clustering (RED-SC), which symmetrically links convolutional and deconvolutional layers with skip-layer connections, with which the training converges much faster. We use a self-expressive layer to generate more accurate linear representation coefficients through different latent representations from multiple latent spaces. Experiments show the superiority of RED-SC in training efficiency and clustering accuracy. Moreover, we are the first one to apply residual encoder-decoder on unsupervised learning tasks.

Shuai Yang, Wenqi Zhu, Yuesheng Zhu

Subspace clustering (SC) refers to the problem of clustering high-dimensional data into a union of low-dimensional subspaces. Based on spectral clustering, state-of-the-art approaches solve SC problem within a two-stage framework. In the first stage, data representation techniques are applied to draw an affinity matrix from the original data. In the second stage, spectral clustering is directly applied to the affinity matrix so that data can be grouped into different subspaces. However, the affinity matrix obtained in the first stage usually fails to reveal the authentic relationship between data points, which leads to inaccurate clustering results. In this paper, we propose a universal Three-Stage Subspace Clustering framework (3S-SC). Graph-Based Transformation and Optimization (GBTO) is added between data representation and spectral clustering. The affinity matrix is obtained in the first stage, then it goes through the second stage, where the proposed GBTO is applied to generate a reconstructed affinity matrix with more authentic similarity between data points. Spectral clustering is applied after GBTO, which is the third stage. We verify our 3S-SC framework with GBTO through theoretical analysis. Experiments on both synthetic data and the real-world data sets of handwritten digits and human faces demonstrate the universality of the proposed 3S-SC framework in improving the connectivity and accuracy of SC methods based on $\ell_0$, $\ell_1$, $\ell_2$ or nuclear norm regularization.