Recently, deep learning based clustering methods are shown superior to traditional ones by jointly conducting representation learning and clustering. These methods rely on the assumptions that the number of clusters is known, and that there is one single partition over the data and all attributes define that partition. However, in real-world applications, prior knowledge of the number of clusters is usually unavailable and there are multiple ways to partition the data based on subsets of attributes. To resolve the issues, we propose latent tree variational autoencoder (LTVAE), which simultaneously performs representation learning and multidimensional clustering. LTVAE learns latent embeddings from data, discovers multi-facet clustering structures based on subsets of latent features, and automatically determines the number of clusters in each facet. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art clustering performance and reals reasonable multifacet structures of the data.

我们研究了一种变分自编码器的变体，其中顶层离散的潜变量是一个超结构。我们的超结构是多个超级潜变量的树结构，并且可以自动从数据中学习。与以往的深度学习方法不同，LTVAE可以生成多个数据分区，每个分区都由一个超级潜变量给出。这是由于高维数据通常具有许多不同的自然方面，可以用多种方式进行有意义的划分。

变分自编码器中学习潜在超结构用于深层多维聚类