Multiclass Total Variation Clustering

Xavier Bresson, Thomas Laurent, David Uminsky, James von Brecht

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 26 (NIPS 2013)

Ideas from the image processing literature have recently motivated a new set of clustering algorithms that rely on the concept of total variation. While these algorithms perform well for bi-partitioning tasks, their recursive extensions yield unimpressive results for multiclass clustering tasks. This paper presents a general framework for multiclass total variation clustering that does not rely on recursion. The results greatly outperform previous total variation algorithms and compare well with state-of-the-art NMF approaches.