Introduction to Information Retrieval

Introduction to
Information Retrieval
CS276: Information Retrieval and Web Search
Pandu Nayak and Prabhakar Raghavan

Lecture 12: Clustering

Introduction to Information Retrieval

Today’s Topic: Clustering

 Document clustering
 Motivations
 Document representations
 Success criteria
 Clustering algorithms
 Partitional
 Hierarchical
Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch. 16

What is clustering?
 Clustering: the process of grouping a set of objects
into classes of similar objects
 Documents within a cluster should be similar.
 Documents from different clusters should be
dissimilar.
 The commonest form of unsupervised learning
 Unsupervised learning = learning from raw data, as
opposed to supervised data where a classification of
examples is given
 A common and important task that finds many
applications in IR and other places
Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch. 16

A data set with clear cluster structure

 How would
you design
an algorithm
for finding
the three
clusters in
this case?
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.1

Applications of clustering in IR
 Whole corpus analysis/navigation
 Better user interface: search without typing
 For improving recall in search applications
 Better search results (like pseudo RF)
 For better navigation of search results
 Effective “user recall” will be higher
 For speeding up vector space retrieval
 Cluster-based retrieval gives faster search
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Yahoo! Hierarchy isn’t clustering but is the kind

of output you want from clustering
www.yahoo.com/Science
… (30)

agriculture biology physics CS space

... ... ... ...

...
dairy
crops botany cell AI courses craft
magnetism
forestry agronomy evolution HCI missions
relativity
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Google News: automatic clustering gives an

effective news presentation metaphor
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.1

Scatter/Gather: Cutting, Karger, and Pedersen

Introduction to Information Retrieval

For visualizing a document collection and its

themes
 Wise et al, “Visualizing the non-visual” PNNL
 ThemeScapes, Cartia
 [Mountain height = cluster size]
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.1

For improving search recall

 Cluster hypothesis - Documents in the same cluster behave similarly
with respect to relevance to information needs
 Therefore, to improve search recall:
 Cluster docs in corpus a priori
 When a query matches a doc D, also return other docs in the
cluster containing D
 Hope if we do this: The query “car” will also return docs containing
automobile
 Because clustering grouped together docs containing car with
those containing automobile.

Why might this happen?

Introduction to Information Retrieval

yippy.com – grouping search results 11

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.2

Issues for clustering

 Representation for clustering
 Document representation
 Vector space? Normalization?
 Centroids aren’t length normalized
 Need a notion of similarity/distance
 How many clusters?
 Fixed a priori?
 Completely data driven?
 Avoid “trivial” clusters - too large or small
 If a cluster's too large, then for navigation purposes you've
wasted an extra user click without whittling down the set of
documents much.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Notion of similarity/distance
 Ideal: semantic similarity.
 Practical: term-statistical similarity
 We will use cosine similarity.
 Docs as vectors.
 For many algorithms, easier to think in
terms of a distance (rather than similarity)
between docs.
 We will mostly speak of Euclidean distance
 But real implementations use cosine similarity
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Clustering Algorithms
 Flat algorithms
 Usually start with a random (partial) partitioning
 Refine it iteratively
 K means clustering
 (Model based clustering)
 Hierarchical algorithms
 Bottom-up, agglomerative
 (Top-down, divisive)
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Hard vs. soft clustering

 Hard clustering: Each document belongs to exactly one cluster
 More common and easier to do
 Soft clustering: A document can belong to more than one
cluster.
 Makes more sense for applications like creating browsable
hierarchies
 You may want to put a pair of sneakers in two clusters: (i) sports
apparel and (ii) shoes
 You can only do that with a soft clustering approach.
 We won’t do soft clustering today. See IIR 16.5, 18
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Partitioning Algorithms
 Partitioning method: Construct a partition of n
documents into a set of K clusters
 Given: a set of documents and the number K
 Find: a partition of K clusters that optimizes the
chosen partitioning criterion
 Globally optimal
 Intractable for many objective functions
 Ergo, exhaustively enumerate all partitions
 Effective heuristic methods: K-means and K-
medoids algorithms
See also Kleinberg NIPS 2002 – impossibility for natural clustering
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.4

K-Means
 Assumes documents are real-valued vectors.
 Clusters based on centroids (aka the center of gravity
or mean) of points in a cluster, c:
 1 
μ(c)  
| c | xc
x

 Reassignment of instances to clusters is based on

distance to the current cluster centroids.
 (Or one can equivalently phrase it in terms of similarities)
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.4

K-Means Algorithm
Select K random docs {s1, s2,… sK} as seeds.
Until clustering converges (or other stopping criterion):
For each doc di:
Assign di to the cluster cj such that dist(xi, sj) is minimal.
(Next, update the seeds to the centroid of each cluster)
For each cluster cj
sj = (cj)
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.4

K Means Example
(K=2)
Pick seeds
Reassign clusters
Compute centroids
Reassign clusters
x x Compute centroids
x
x
Reassign clusters
Converged!
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.4

Termination conditions
 Several possibilities, e.g.,
 A fixed number of iterations.
 Doc partition unchanged.
 Centroid positions don’t change.

Does this mean that the docs in a

cluster are unchanged?
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.4

Convergence
 Why should the K-means algorithm ever reach a
fixed point?
 A state in which clusters don’t change.
 K-means is a special case of a general procedure
known as the Expectation Maximization (EM)
algorithm.
 EM is known to converge.
 Number of iterations could be large.
 But in practice usually isn’t
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.4
Lower case!

Convergence of K-Means
 Define goodness measure of cluster k as sum of
squared distances from cluster centroid:
 Gk = Σi (di – ck)2 (sum over all di in cluster k)
 G = Σk G k
 Reassignment monotonically decreases G since
each vector is assigned to the closest centroid.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.4

Convergence of K-Means
 Recomputation monotonically decreases each Gk
since (mk is number of members in cluster k):
 Σ (di – a)2 reaches minimum for:
 Σ –2(di – a) = 0
 Σ di = Σ a
 mK a = Σ di
 a = (1/ mk) Σ di = ck
 K-means typically converges quickly
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.4

Time Complexity
 Computing distance between two docs is O(M)
where M is the dimensionality of the vectors.
 Reassigning clusters: O(KN) distance computations,
or O(KNM).
 Computing centroids: Each doc gets added once to
some centroid: O(NM).
 Assume these two steps are each done once for I
iterations: O(IKNM).
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.4

Seed Choice
 Results can vary based on Example showing
random seed selection. sensitivity to seeds
 Some seeds can result in poor
convergence rate, or
convergence to sub-optimal
In the above, if you start
clusterings. with B and E as centroids
 Select good seeds using a heuristic you converge to {A,B,C}
(e.g., doc least similar to any and {D,E,F}
If you start with D and F
existing mean) you converge to
 Try out multiple starting points {A,B,D,E} {C,F}
 Initialize with the results of another
method.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.4

K-means issues, variations, etc.

 Recomputing the centroid after every assignment
(rather than after all points are re-assigned) can
improve speed of convergence of K-means
 Assumes clusters are spherical in vector space
 Sensitive to coordinate changes, weighting etc.
 Disjoint and exhaustive
 Doesn’t have a notion of “outliers” by default
 But can add outlier filtering

Dhillon et al. ICDM 2002 – variation to fix some issues with small
document clusters
Introduction to Information Retrieval

How Many Clusters?

 Number of clusters K is given
 Partition n docs into predetermined number of clusters
 Finding the “right” number of clusters is part of the
problem
 Given docs, partition into an “appropriate” number of
subsets.
 E.g., for query results - ideal value of K not known up front
- though UI may impose limits.
 Can usually take an algorithm for one flavor and
convert to the other.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

K not specified in advance

 Say, the results of a query.
 Solve an optimization problem: penalize having
lots of clusters
 application dependent, e.g., compressed summary
of search results list.
 Tradeoff between having more clusters (better
focus within each cluster) and having too many
clusters
Introduction to Information Retrieval

K not specified in advance

 Given a clustering, define the Benefit for a
doc to be the cosine similarity to its
centroid
 Define the Total Benefit to be the sum of
the individual doc Benefits.

Why is there always a clustering of Total Benefit n?

Introduction to Information Retrieval

Penalize lots of clusters

 For each cluster, we have a Cost C.
 Thus for a clustering with K clusters, the Total Cost is
KC.
 Define the Value of a clustering to be =
Total Benefit - Total Cost.
 Find the clustering of highest value, over all choices
of K.
 Total benefit increases with increasing K. But can stop
when it doesn’t increase by “much”. The Cost term
enforces this.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.3

What Is A Good Clustering?

 Internal criterion: A good clustering will produce
high quality clusters in which:
 the intra-class (that is, intra-cluster) similarity is
high
 the inter-class similarity is low
 The measured quality of a clustering depends on
both the document representation and the
similarity measure used
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.3

External criteria for clustering quality

 Quality measured by its ability to discover some
or all of the hidden patterns or latent classes in
gold standard data
 Assesses a clustering with respect to ground truth
… requires labeled data
 Assume documents with C gold standard classes,
while our clustering algorithms produce K
clusters, ω1, ω2, …, ωK with ni members.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.3

External Evaluation of Cluster Quality

 Simple measure: purity, the ratio between the
dominant class in the cluster πi and the size of
cluster ωi 1
Purity (i )  max j (nij ) j  C
ni

 Biased because having n clusters maximizes

purity
 Others are entropy of classes in clusters (or
mutual information between classes and
clusters)
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.3

Purity example

     
     
    

Cluster I Cluster II Cluster III

Cluster I: Purity = 1/6 (max(5, 1, 0)) = 5/6

Cluster II: Purity = 1/6 (max(1, 4, 1)) = 4/6

Cluster III: Purity = 1/5 (max(2, 0, 3)) = 3/5

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.3

Rand Index measures between pair

decisions. Here RI = 0.68
Different
Number of Same Cluster
Clusters in
points in clustering
clustering

Same class in
ground truth 20 24

Different
classes in 20 72
ground truth
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 16.3

Rand index and Cluster F-measure

A D
RI 
A B C  D
Compare with standard Precision and Recall:
A A
P R
A B AC
People also define and use a cluster F-measure, which is
probably a better measure.
Introduction to Information Retrieval Ch. 17

Hierarchical Clustering
 Build a tree-based hierarchical taxonomy
(dendrogram) from a set of documents.
animal

vertebrate invertebrate

fish reptile amphib. mammal worm insect crustacean

 One approach: recursive application of a

partitional clustering algorithm.
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Dendrogram: Hierarchical Clustering

 Clustering obtained
by cutting the
dendrogram at a
desired level: each
connected
component forms a
cluster.

38
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 17.1

Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering

(HAC)
 Starts with each doc in a separate cluster
 then repeatedly joins the closest pair of
clusters, until there is only one cluster.
 The history of merging forms a binary tree
or hierarchy.

Note: the resulting clusters are still “hard” and induce a partition
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 17.2

Closest pair of clusters

 Many variants to defining closest pair of clusters
 Single-link
 Similarity of the most cosine-similar (single-link)
 Complete-link
 Similarity of the “furthest” points, the least cosine-similar
 Centroid
 Clusters whose centroids (centers of gravity) are the most
cosine-similar
 Average-link
 Average cosine between pairs of elements
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 17.2

Single Link Agglomerative Clustering

 Use maximum similarity of pairs:

sim (ci ,c j )  max sim ( x, y )

xci , yc j
 Can result in “straggly” (long and thin) clusters
due to chaining effect.
 After merging ci and cj, the similarity of the
resulting cluster to another cluster, ck, is:

sim ((ci  c j ), ck )  max( sim (ci , ck ), sim (c j , ck ))

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 17.2

Single Link Example

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 17.2

Complete Link
 Use minimum similarity of pairs:

sim (ci ,c j )  min sim ( x, y )

xci , yc j
 Makes “tighter,” spherical clusters that are typically
preferable.
 After merging ci and cj, the similarity of the resulting
cluster to another cluster, ck, is:
sim ((ci  c j ), ck )  min( sim (ci , ck ), sim (c j , ck ))

Ci Cj Ck
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 17.2

Complete Link Example

Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 17.2.1

Computational Complexity
 In the first iteration, all HAC methods need to
compute similarity of all pairs of N initial instances,
which is O(N2).
 In each of the subsequent N2 merging iterations,
compute the distance between the most recently
created cluster and all other existing clusters.
 In order to maintain an overall O(N2) performance,
computing similarity to each other cluster must be
done in constant time.
 Often O(N3) if done naively or O(N2 log N) if done more
cleverly
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 17.3

Group Average
 Similarity of two clusters = average similarity of all
pairs within merged cluster.
1  
sim (ci , c j )    sim ( x , y )
ci  c j ( ci  c j  1) x( ci c j ) y( ci c j ): y x
 Compromise between single and complete link.
 Two options:
 Averaged across all ordered pairs in the merged cluster
 Averaged over all pairs between the two original clusters
 No clear difference in efficacy
Introduction to Information Retrieval Sec. 17.3

Computing Group Average Similarity

 Always maintain sum of vectors in each cluster.
 
s (c j )  x

xc j
 Compute similarity of clusters in constant time:

   
( s (ci )  s (c j ))  ( s (ci )  s (c j ))  (| ci |  | c j |)
sim (ci , c j ) 
(| ci |  | c j |)(| ci |  | c j | 1)
Introduction to Information Retrieval

Final word and resources

 In clustering, clusters are inferred from the data without
human input (unsupervised learning)
 However, in practice, it’s a bit less clear: there are many
ways of influencing the outcome of clustering: number of
clusters, similarity measure, representation of
documents, . . .

 Resources
 IIR 16 except 16.5
 IIR 17.1–17.3