Solving Soft Clustering Ensemble via $k$-Sparse Discrete Wasserstein Barycenter
Datasets and Benchmarks Track
Authors: Ruizhe Qin, Mengying Li, Hu Ding

Clustering ensemble is one of the most important problems in  ensemble learning. Though it has been extensively studied in the past decades, the existing methods often suffer from the issues like high computational complexity and the difficulty on understanding the consensus. In this paper, we study the more general soft clustering ensemble problem where each individual solution is a soft clustering. We connect it to the well-known discrete Wasserstein barycenter problem in geometry. Based on some novel geometric insights in high dimensions, we propose the sampling-based algorithms with provable quality guarantees. We also provide the systematical analysis on the consensus of our model. Finally, we conduct the experiments  to evaluate our proposed algorithms.