MC-GTA

Author(s)
Zhangyu Wang, Gengchen Mai, Krzysztof Janowicz, Ni Lao
Abstract

A wide range of (multivariate) temporal (1D) and spatial (2D) data analysis tasks, such as grouping vehicle sensor trajectories, can be formulated as clustering with given metric constraints. Existing metric-constrained clustering algorithms overlook the rich correlation between feature similarity and metric distance, i.e., metric autocorrelation. The model-based variations of these clustering algorithms (e.g. TICC and STICC) achieve SOTA performance, yet suffer from computational instability and complexity by using a metric-constrained Expectation-Maximization procedure. In order to address these two problems, we propose a novel clustering algorithm, MC-GTA (Model-based Clustering via Goodness-of-fit Tests with Autocorrelations). Its objective is only composed of pairwise weighted sums of feature similarity terms (square Wasserstein-2 distance) and metric autocorrelation terms (a novel multivariate generalization of classic semivariogram). We show that MC-GTA is effectively minimizing the total hinge loss for intra-cluster observation pairs not passing goodness-of-fit tests, i.e., statistically not originating from the same distribution. Experiments on 1D/2D synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that MC-GTA successfully incorporates metric autocorrelation. It outperforms strong baselines by large margins (up to 14.3% in ARI and 32.1% in NMI) with faster and stabler optimization (>10x speedup).

Organisation(s)
Department of Geography and Regional Research
External organisation(s)
University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Georgia, University of Texas, Austin, Google
Pages
51086-51104
No. of pages
19
Publication date
2024
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
102001 Artificial intelligence
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Artificial Intelligence, Software, Control and Systems Engineering, Statistics and Probability
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/eab48800-652f-48a5-bb58-6ec676fd14d1