DIAS: A disassemble-assemble framework for highly sparse text clustering

Upon extensive studies, text clustering remains a critical challenge in data mining community. Even by various techniques proposed to overcome some of these challenges, there still exist problems when dealing with weakly related or even noisy features. In response to this, we propose a Dlssemble-ASsemble (DIAS) framework for text clustering. DIAS employs simple random feature sampling to disassemble high-dimensional text data and gains diverse structural knowledge. This also does good to avoiding the bulk of noisy features. Then the multi-view knowledge is assembled by weighted Information-theoretic Consensus Clustering (IC-C) in order to gain a high-quality consensus partitioning. Extensive experiments on eight real-world text data sets demonstrate the advantages of DIAS over other widely used methods. In particular, DIAS shows strengths in learning from very weak basic partitionings. In addition, it is the natural suitability to distributed computing that makes DIAS become a promising candidate for big text clustering.