Papers › Convex Covariate Clustering for Classification

Convex Covariate Clustering for Classification

5 Mar 2019arXiv:1903.01680archive 2025-07-28

Daniel Andrade, Kenji Fukumizu, Yuzuru Okajima

Clustering, like covariate selection for classification, is an important step to compress and interpret the data. However, clustering of covariates is often performed independently of the classification step, which can lead to undesirable clustering results that harm interpretability and compression rate. Therefore, we propose a method that can cluster covariates while taking into account class label information of samples. We formulate the problem as a convex optimization problem which uses both, a-priori similarity information between covariates, and information from class-labeled samples. Like ordinary convex clustering [Chi and Lange, 2015], the proposed method offers a unique global minima making it insensitive to initialization. In order to solve the convex problem, we propose a specialized alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), which scales up to several thousands of variables. Furthermore, in order to circumvent computationally expensive cross-validation, we propose a model selection criterion based on approximating the marginal likelihood. Experiments on synthetic and real data confirm the usefulness of the proposed clustering method and the selection criterion.

PaperPDFCode

Code

andrade-stats/convexCovariateClusteringClassification officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

ClassificationClusteringGeneral ClassificationModel Selection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Interpretability

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections