Multi-view Deep Embedded Clustering: Exploring a new dimension of air pollution

Abstract

Clustering is essential for uncovering hidden patterns and relationships in complex datasets. Its importance reveals when labeled data is scarce, expensive, time-consuming to obtain. Real-world applications often exhibit heterogeneity due to the diverse nature of the encapsulated data. This heterogeneity poses a significant challenge in data analysis, modeling, and makes traditional clustering methods ineffective. By adopting a hybrid architecture based on two promising techniques, multi-view and deep clustering, our method achieved better results, outperforming several existing methods including K-means, deep embedded clustering, deep clustering network, deep embedded K-means among many others. Multiple experiments conducted across diverse publicly accessible datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method based on well established evaluation metrics such as Accuracy and Normalized Mutual Information (NMI). Furthermore, we applied our method on the air pollution data of Luxembourg, a country with sparse sensor coverage. Our method demonstrated promising results, and unveil a new dimension that pave way for future work in air pollution's level prediction and hotspots detection, crucial steps towards effective pollution reduction strategies.