On combining multiple clusterings

Abstract

Many problems can be reduced to the problem of combining multiple clusterings. In this paper, we first summarize different application scenarios of combining multiple clusterings and provide a new perspective of viewing the problem as a categorical clustering problem. We then show the connections between various consensus and clustering criteria and discuss the complexity results of the problem. Finally we propose a new method to determine the final clustering. Experiments on kinship terms and clustering popular music from heterogeneous feature sets show the effectiveness of combining multiple clusterings. Copyright 2004 ACM.