A major challenge when using k-means clustering often is how to choose the parameter k, the number of clusters. In this letter, we want to point out that it is very easy to draw poor conclusions from a common heuristic, the "elbow method". Better alternatives have been known in literature for a long time, and we want to draw attention to some of these easy to use options, that often perform better. This letter is a call to stop using the elbow method altogether, because it severely lacks theoretic support, and we want to encourage educators to discuss the problems of the method -- if introducing it in class at all -- and teach alternatives instead, while researchers and reviewers should reject conclusions drawn from the elbow method.

We review clustering as an analysis tool and the underlying concepts from an introductory perspective. What is clustering and how can clusterings be realised programmatically? How can data be represented and prepared for a clustering task? And how can clustering results be validated? Connectivity-based versus prototype-based approaches are reflected in the context of several popular methods: single-linkage, spectral embedding, k-means, and Gaussian mixtures are discussed as well as the density-based protocols (H)DBSCAN, Jarvis-Patrick, CommonNN, and density-peaks.

群集分析需要许多决定：聚类方法和隐含的参考模型，群集数，通常，几个超参数和算法调整。在实践中，一个分区产生多个分区，基于验证或选择标准选择最终的分区。存在丰富的验证方法，即隐式或明确地假设某个聚类概念。此外，它们通常仅限于从特定方法获得的分区上操作。在本文中，我们专注于可以通过二次或线性边界分开的群体。参考集群概念通过二次判别符号函数和描述集群大小，中心和分散的参数定义。我们开发了两个名为二次分数的群集质量标准。我们表明这些标准与从一般类椭圆对称分布产生的组一致。对这种类型的组追求在应用程序中是常见的。研究了与混合模型和模型的聚类的似然理论的连接。基于Bootstrap重新采样的二次分数，我们提出了一个选择规则，允许在许多聚类解决方案中选择。所提出的方法具有独特的优点，即它可以比较不能与其他最先进的方法进行比较的分区。广泛的数值实验和实际数据的分析表明，即使某些竞争方法在某些设置中出现优越，所提出的方法也实现了更好的整体性能。

聚类结果的评估很困难，高度依赖于评估的数据集和情人的观点。有许多不同的聚类质量度量，试图提供一般度量以验证聚类结果。一个非常流行的措施是轮廓。我们讨论轮廓的有效基于MEDOI的变体，对其性质进行理论分析，并为直接优化提供两个快速版本。我们将原始轮廓中的想法与著名的PAM算法及其最新改进的想法相结合。其中一个版本保证了与原始变体相等的结果，并提供了$ O（k^2）$的运行加速。在有关30000个样品和$ k $ = 100的真实数据实验中，我们观察到10464 $ \ times $速度与原始的Pammedsil算法相比。

腔是总结数据的最受欢迎的范例之一。特别是，存在许多用于聚类问题的高性能核心，例如理论和实践中的$ k $ - 均值。奇怪的是，没有进行比较可用$ k $ - 均值核心的质量的工作。在本文中，我们进行了这样的评估。目前尚无算法来测量候选核心的失真。我们提供了一些证据，表明为什么这可能在计算上很难。为了补充这一点，我们提出了一个基准，我们认为计算核心具有挑战性，这也使我们对核心的评估很容易（启发式）评估。使用此基准和现实世界数据集，我们对理论和实践中最常用的核心算法进行了详尽的评估。

在过去二十年中，识别具有不同纵向数据趋势的群体的方法已经成为跨越许多研究领域的兴趣。为了支持研究人员，我们总结了文献关于纵向聚类的指导。此外，我们提供了一种纵向聚类方法，包括基于基团的轨迹建模（GBTM），生长混合模拟（GMM）和纵向K平均值（KML）。该方法在基本级别引入，并列出了强度，限制和模型扩展。在最近数据收集的发展之后，将注意这些方法的适用性赋予密集的纵向数据（ILD）。我们展示了使用R.中可用的包在合成数据集上的应用程序的应用。

内部群集有效性度量（例如Calinski-Harabasz，Dunn或Davies-Bouldin指数）经常用于选择适当数量的分区数量，应将数据集分为二。在本文中，我们考虑如果将这些索引视为无监督学习活动中的客观功能会发生什么。关于轮廓指数的最佳分组是否真的有意义？事实证明，许多群集有效性指数促进了聚类，这些聚类与专家知识相匹配。我们还引入了邓恩指数的一个新的，表现出色的变体，该变体是建立在OWA操作员和接近邻居图的基础上的，因此，无论其形状如何，都可以更好地相互分离。

In recent years, spectral clustering has become one of the most popular modern clustering algorithms. It is simple to implement, can be solved efficiently by standard linear algebra software, and very often outperforms traditional clustering algorithms such as the k-means algorithm. On the first glance spectral clustering appears slightly mysterious, and it is not obvious to see why it works at all and what it really does. The goal of this tutorial is to give some intuition on those questions. We describe different graph Laplacians and their basic properties, present the most common spectral clustering algorithms, and derive those algorithms from scratch by several different approaches. Advantages and disadvantages of the different spectral clustering algorithms are discussed.

$ k $ -means集群是各学科的基本问题。此问题是非核解，并且标准算法仅保证找到本地最佳算法。利用[1]的本地解决方案的结构，我们提出了一种用于逃离不良局部解决方案并恢复全球解决方案（或地面真理）的一般算法框架。该框架包括迭代：（i）在本地解决方案中检测MIS指定的群集，并通过非本地操作来改进当前本地解决方案。我们讨论这些步骤的实施，并阐明所提出的框架如何从几何视角统一文献中的k $ -means算法的变体。此外，我们介绍了所提出的框架的两个自然扩展，其中初始数量的群集被遗漏。我们为我们的方法提供了理论理的理由，这是通过广泛的实验证实的。

在机器学习中调用多种假设需要了解歧管的几何形状和维度，理论决定了需要多少样本。但是，在应用程序数据中，采样可能不均匀，歧管属性是未知的，并且（可能）非纯化；这意味着社区必须适应本地结构。我们介绍了一种用于推断相似性内核提供数据的自适应邻域的算法。从本地保守的邻域（Gabriel）图开始，我们根据加权对应物进行迭代率稀疏。在每个步骤中，线性程序在全球范围内产生最小的社区，并且体积统计数据揭示了邻居离群值可能违反了歧管几何形状。我们将自适应邻域应用于非线性维度降低，地球计算和维度估计。与标准算法的比较，例如使用K-Nearest邻居，证明了它们的实用性。

聚类算法的全面基准是困难的两个关键因素：（i）〜这种无监督的学习方法的独特数学定义和（ii）〜某些聚类算法采用的生成模型或群集标准之间的依赖性的依赖性内部集群验证。因此，对严格基准测试的最佳做法没有达成共识，以及是否有可能在给定申请的背景之外。在这里，我们认为合成数据集必须继续在群集算法的评估中发挥重要作用，但这需要构建适当地涵盖影响聚类算法性能的各种属性集的基准。通过我们的框架，我们展示了重要的角色进化算法，以支持灵活的这种基准，允许简单的修改和扩展。我们说明了我们框架的两种可能用途：（i）〜基准数据的演变与一组手派生属性和（ii）〜生成梳理给定对算法之间的性能差异的数据集。我们的作品对设计集群基准的设计具有足够挑战广泛算法的集群基准，并进一步了解特定方法的优势和弱点。

Variable and feature selection have become the focus of much research in areas of application for which datasets with tens or hundreds of thousands of variables are available. These areas include text processing of internet documents, gene expression array analysis, and combinatorial chemistry. The objective of variable selection is three-fold: improving the prediction performance of the predictors, providing faster and more cost-effective predictors, and providing a better understanding of the underlying process that generated the data. The contributions of this special issue cover a wide range of aspects of such problems: providing a better definition of the objective function, feature construction, feature ranking, multivariate feature selection, efficient search methods, and feature validity assessment methods.

Understanding geometric properties of natural language processing models' latent spaces allows the manipulation of these properties for improved performance on downstream tasks. One such property is the amount of data spread in a model's latent space, or how fully the available latent space is being used. In this work, we define data spread and demonstrate that the commonly used measures of data spread, Average Cosine Similarity and a partition function min/max ratio I(V), do not provide reliable metrics to compare the use of latent space across models. We propose and examine eight alternative measures of data spread, all but one of which improve over these current metrics when applied to seven synthetic data distributions. Of our proposed measures, we recommend one principal component-based measure and one entropy-based measure that provide reliable, relative measures of spread and can be used to compare models of different sizes and dimensionalities.

封闭曲线的建模和不确定性量化是形状分析领域的重要问题，并且可以对随后的统计任务产生重大影响。这些任务中的许多涉及封闭曲线的集合，这些曲线通常在多个层面上表现出结构相似性。以有效融合这种曲线间依赖性的方式对多个封闭曲线进行建模仍然是一个具有挑战性的问题。在这项工作中，我们提出并研究了一个多数输出（又称多输出），多维高斯流程建模框架。我们说明了提出的方法学进步，并在几个曲线和形状相关的任务上证明了有意义的不确定性量化的实用性。这种基于模型的方法不仅解决了用内核构造对封闭曲线（及其形状）的推断问题，而且还为通常对功能对象的多层依赖性的非参数建模打开了门。

聚类是一种无监督的机器学习方法，其中未标记的元素/对象被分组在一起，旨在构建成熟的群集，以根据其相似性对其元素进行分类。该过程的目的是向研究人员提供有用的帮助，以帮助她/他确定数据中的模式。在处理大型数据库时，如果没有聚类算法的贡献，这种模式可能无法轻易检测到。本文对最广泛使用的聚类方法进行了深入的描述，并伴随着有关合适的参数选择和初始化的有用演示。同时，本文不仅代表了一篇评论，该评论突出了所检查的聚类技术的主要要素，而且强调了这些算法基于3个数据集的聚类效率的比较，从而在对抗性和复杂性中揭示了其现有的弱点和能力，在持续的离散和持续的离散和离散和持续的差异。观察。产生的结果有助于我们根据数据集的大小提取有关检查聚类技术的适当性的宝贵结论。

The accuracy of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) classification depends significantly on the metric used to compute distances between different examples. In this paper, we show how to learn a Mahalanobis distance metric for kNN classification from labeled examples. The Mahalanobis metric can equivalently be viewed as a global linear transformation of the input space that precedes kNN classification using Euclidean distances. In our approach, the metric is trained with the goal that the k-nearest neighbors always belong to the same class while examples from different classes are separated by a large margin. As in support vector machines (SVMs), the margin criterion leads to a convex optimization based on the hinge loss. Unlike learning in SVMs, however, our approach requires no modification or extension for problems in multiway (as opposed to binary) classification. In our framework, the Mahalanobis distance metric is obtained as the solution to a semidefinite program. On several data sets of varying size and difficulty, we find that metrics trained in this way lead to significant improvements in kNN classification. Sometimes these results can be further improved by clustering the training examples and learning an individual metric within each cluster. We show how to learn and combine these local metrics in a globally integrated manner.

We present a novel clustering algorithm, visClust, that is based on lower dimensional data representations and visual interpretation. Thereto, we design a transformation that allows the data to be represented by a binary integer array enabling the further use of image processing methods to select a partition. Qualitative and quantitative analyses show that the algorithm obtains high accuracy (measured with an adjusted one-sided Rand-Index) and requires low runtime and RAM. We compare the results to 6 state-of-the-art algorithms, confirming the quality of visClust by outperforming in most experiments. Moreover, the algorithm asks for just one obligatory input parameter while allowing optimization via optional parameters. The code is made available on GitHub.

最近有一项激烈的活动在嵌入非常高维和非线性数据结构的嵌入中，其中大部分在数据科学和机器学习文献中。我们分四部分调查这项活动。在第一部分中，我们涵盖了非线性方法，例如主曲线，多维缩放，局部线性方法，ISOMAP，基于图形的方法和扩散映射，基于内核的方法和随机投影。第二部分与拓扑嵌入方法有关，特别是将拓扑特性映射到持久图和映射器算法中。具有巨大增长的另一种类型的数据集是非常高维网络数据。第三部分中考虑的任务是如何将此类数据嵌入中等维度的向量空间中，以使数据适合传统技术，例如群集和分类技术。可以说，这是算法机器学习方法与统计建模（所谓的随机块建模）之间的对比度。在论文中，我们讨论了两种方法的利弊。调查的最后一部分涉及嵌入$ \ mathbb {r}^ 2 $，即可视化中。提出了三种方法：基于第一部分，第二和第三部分中的方法，$ t $ -sne，UMAP和大节。在两个模拟数据集上进行了说明和比较。一个由嘈杂的ranunculoid曲线组成的三胞胎，另一个由随机块模型和两种类型的节点产生的复杂性的网络组成。

Grid search and manual search are the most widely used strategies for hyper-parameter optimization. This paper shows empirically and theoretically that randomly chosen trials are more efficient for hyper-parameter optimization than trials on a grid. Empirical evidence comes from a comparison with a large previous study that used grid search and manual search to configure neural networks and deep belief networks. Compared with neural networks configured by a pure grid search, we find that random search over the same domain is able to find models that are as good or better within a small fraction of the computation time. Granting random search the same computational budget, random search finds better models by effectively searching a larger, less promising configuration space. Compared with deep belief networks configured by a thoughtful combination of manual search and grid search, purely random search over the same 32-dimensional configuration space found statistically equal performance on four of seven data sets, and superior performance on one of seven. A Gaussian process analysis of the function from hyper-parameters to validation set performance reveals that for most data sets only a few of the hyper-parameters really matter, but that different hyper-parameters are important on different data sets. This phenomenon makes grid search a poor choice for configuring algorithms for new data sets. Our analysis casts some light on why recent "High Throughput" methods achieve surprising success-they appear to search through a large number of hyper-parameters because most hyper-parameters do not matter much. We anticipate that growing interest in large hierarchical models will place an increasing burden on techniques for hyper-parameter optimization; this work shows that random search is a natural baseline against which to judge progress in the development of adaptive (sequential) hyper-parameter optimization algorithms.

We consider a semi-supervised $k$-clustering problem where information is available on whether pairs of objects are in the same or in different clusters. This information is either available with certainty or with a limited level of confidence. We introduce the PCCC algorithm, which iteratively assigns objects to clusters while accounting for the information provided on the pairs of objects. Our algorithm can include relationships as hard constraints that are guaranteed to be satisfied or as soft constraints that can be violated subject to a penalty. This flexibility distinguishes our algorithm from the state-of-the-art in which all pairwise constraints are either considered hard, or all are considered soft. Unlike existing algorithms, our algorithm scales to large-scale instances with up to 60,000 objects, 100 clusters, and millions of cannot-link constraints (which are the most challenging constraints to incorporate). We compare the PCCC algorithm with state-of-the-art approaches in an extensive computational study. Even though the PCCC algorithm is more general than the state-of-the-art approaches in its applicability, it outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on instances with all hard constraints or all soft constraints both in terms of running time and various metrics of solution quality. The source code of the PCCC algorithm is publicly available on GitHub.