Facilitated by the powerful feature extraction ability of neural networks, deep clustering has achieved great success in analyzing high-dimensional and complex real-world data. The performance of deep clustering methods is affected by various factors such as network structures and learning objectives. However, as pointed out in this survey, the essence of deep clustering lies in the incorporation and utilization of prior knowledge, which is largely ignored by existing works. From pioneering deep clustering methods based on data structure assumptions to recent contrastive clustering methods based on data augmentation invariances, the development of deep clustering intrinsically corresponds to the evolution of prior knowledge. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of deep clustering methods by categorizing them into six types of prior knowledge. We find that in general the prior innovation follows two trends, namely, i) from mining to constructing, and ii) from internal to external. Besides, we provide a benchmark on five widely-used datasets and analyze the performance of methods with diverse priors. By providing a novel prior knowledge perspective, we hope this survey could provide some novel insights and inspire future research in the deep clustering community.

基于神经网络的深度聚类在分析高维复杂现实世界数据方面取得了巨大成功，然而现有工作往往忽视了深度聚类中先验知识的融合和利用，本文通过对各种先验知识进行分类，提供了全面的深度聚类方法综述，并提供了五个广泛使用的数据集的基准测试和方法性能分析，希望能够为深度聚类研究提供一些新的见解和启发。

深度聚类综述：从先验角度