Hierarchical clustering with maximum density paths and mixture models
Hierarchical clustering is an effective, interpretable method for analyzing structure in data. It reveals insights at multiple scales without requiring a predefined number of clusters and captures nested patterns and subtle relationships, which are often missed by flat clustering approaches. However, existing hierarchical clustering methods struggle with high-dimensional data, especially when there are no clear density gaps between modes. In this work, we introduce t-NEB, a probabilistically grounded hierarchical clustering method, which yields state-of-the-art clustering performance on naturalistic high-dimensional data. t-NEB consists of three steps: (1) density estimation via overclustering; (2) finding maximum density paths between clusters; (3) creating a hierarchical structure via bottom-up cluster merging. t-NEB uses a probabilistic parametric density model for both overclustering and cluster merging, which yields both high clustering performance and a meaningful hierarchy, making it a valuable tool for exploratory data analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/ecker-lab/tneb clustering.
Code (1)
Tasks
ClusteringDensity EstimationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Mixture model modal clustering
The two most extended density-based approaches to clustering are surely mixture model clustering and modal clustering. In the mixture model approach, the density is represented as a mixture and clusters are associated to…
ClusteringmodelAutoGMM: Automatic and Hierarchical Gaussian Mixture Modeling in Python
Background: Gaussian mixture modeling is a fundamental tool in clustering, as well as discriminant analysis and semiparametric density estimation. However, estimating the optimal model for any given number of components …
ClusteringDensity EstimationStatistical Modeling of Univariate Multimodal Data
Unimodality constitutes a key property indicating grouping behavior of the data around a single mode of its density. We propose a method that partitions univariate data into unimodal subsets through recursive splitting a…
Density EstimationSurvival Modeling from Whole Slide Images via Patch-Level Graph Clustering and Mixture Density Experts
We propose a modular framework for predicting cancer specific survival directly from whole slide pathology images (WSIs). The framework consists of four key stages designed to capture prognostic and morphological heterog…
Graph ClusteringConnecting Spectral Clustering to Maximum Margins and Level Sets
We study the connections between spectral clustering and the problems of maximum margin clustering, and estimation of the components of level sets of a density function. Specifically, we obtain bounds on the eigenvectors…
Clustering