Bipartite Split-Merge Evolutionary Clustering

Abstract

We propose a split-merge framework for evolutionary clustering. The proposed clustering technique, entitled Split-Merge Evolutionary Clustering is supposed to be more robust to concept drift scenarios by providing the flexibility to consider at each step a portion of the data and derive clusters from it to be used subsequently to update the existing clustering solution. The proposed framework is built around the idea to model two clustering solutions as a bipartite graph, which guides the update of the existing clustering solution by merging some clusters with ones from the newly constructed clustering while others are transformed by splitting their elements among several new clusters. We have evaluated and compared the discussed evolutionary clustering technique with two other state of the art algorithms: a bipartite correlation clustering (PivotBiCluster) and an incremental evolving clustering (Dynamic split-and-merge).