通过袋装法与特征丢弃,实现可解释聚类分析
Explainable cluster analysis: a bagging approach
- 结合袋装法与特征丢弃,生成特征重要性评分
- 在小样本或噪声数据下提升聚类稳定性与鲁棒性
- 输出共识聚类结果与特征重要性,适合需要可解释性的场景
聚类方法的一大局限是缺乏可解释性:通常无法说明哪些特征驱动了相似观测的分组。为此,我们提出一种基于集成的聚类框架,结合袋装法与特征丢弃,生成特征重要性评分,类比于监督随机森林中的特征重要性机制。通过多个自助抽样方案并聚合所得划分,该方法提升了聚类定义的稳定性和鲁棒性,尤其在小样本或噪声环境下表现更优。特征重要性通过信息论方法评估:每一步计算各特征与估计聚类标签之间的互信息,并以聚类有效性度量加权,突出结构良好的划分,再聚合为最终得分。该方法输出共识划分及对应的特征重要性,实现对聚类结构与变量相关性的统一解释。其有效性在多个模拟和真实数据集上得到验证。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
A major limitation of clustering approaches is their lack of explainability: methods rarely provide insight into which features drive the grouping of similar observations. To address this limitation, we propose an ensemble-based clustering framework that integrates bagging and feature dropout to generate feature importance scores, in analogy with feature importance mechanisms in supervised random forests. By leveraging multiple bootstrap resampling schemes and aggregating the resulting partitions, the method improves stability and robustness of the cluster definition, particularly in small-sample or noisy settings. Feature importance is assessed through an information-theoretic approach: at each step, the mutual information between each feature and the estimated cluster labels is computed and weighted by a measure of clustering validity to emphasize well-formed partitions, before being aggregated into a final score. The method outputs both a consensus partition and a corresponding measure of feature importance, enabling a unified interpretation of clustering structure and variable relevance. Its effectiveness is demonstrated on multiple simulated and real-world datasets.
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