A deep clustering framework integrating pairwise constraints and a VMF mixture model

We presented a novel deep generative clustering model called Variational Deep Embedding based on Pairwise constraints and the Von Mises-Fisher mixture model (VDEPV). VDEPV consists of fully connected neural networks capable of learning latent representations from raw data and accurately predicting cluster assignments. Under the assumption of a genuinely non-informative prior, VDEPV adopted a von Mises-Fisher mixture model to depict the hyperspherical interpretation of the data. We defined and established pairwise constraints by employing a random sample mining strategy and applying data augmentation techniques. These constraints enhanced the compactness of intra-cluster samples in the spherical embedding space while improving inter-cluster samples' separability. By minimizing Kullback-Leibler divergence, we formulated a clustering loss function based on pairwise constraints, which regularized the joint probability distribution of latent variables and cluster labels. Comparative experiments with other deep clustering methods demonstrated the excellent performance of VDEPV.