A Hierarchical Consensus Architecture for Robust Document Clustering

Abstract

A major problem encountered by text clustering practitioners is the difficulty of determining a priori which is the optimal text representation and clustering technique for a given clustering problem. As a step towards building robust document partitioning systems, we present a strategy based on a hierarchical consensus clustering architecture that operates on a wide diversity of document representations and partitions. The conducted experiments show that the proposed method is capable of yielding a consensus clustering that is comparable to the best individual clustering available even in the presence of a large number of poor individual labelings, outperforming classic non-hierarchical consensus approaches in terms of performance and computational cost.