Bayesian Nonparametric Multilevel Clustering with Group-Level Contexts
This work addresses clustering challenges in domains like text and image analysis by leveraging context information, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing Dirichlet process methods.
The authors tackled the problem of multilevel clustering by developing a Bayesian nonparametric framework that incorporates group-level context information to simultaneously discover low-dimensional structures and partition groups, demonstrating advantages in text and image domains through extensive experiments.
We present a Bayesian nonparametric framework for multilevel clustering which utilizes group-level context information to simultaneously discover low-dimensional structures of the group contents and partitions groups into clusters. Using the Dirichlet process as the building block, our model constructs a product base-measure with a nested structure to accommodate content and context observations at multiple levels. The proposed model possesses properties that link the nested Dirichlet processes (nDP) and the Dirichlet process mixture models (DPM) in an interesting way: integrating out all contents results in the DPM over contexts, whereas integrating out group-specific contexts results in the nDP mixture over content variables. We provide a Polya-urn view of the model and an efficient collapsed Gibbs inference procedure. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the advantage of utilizing context information via our model in both text and image domains.