The Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) is one of the most used unsupervised machine learning models. But although the default choice of a Gaussian distribution for both the prior and posterior represents a mathematically convenient distribution often leading to competitive results, we show that this parameterization fails to model data with a latent hyperspherical structure. To address this issue we propose using a von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution instead, leading to a hyperspherical latent space. Through a series of experiments we show how such a hyperspherical VAE, or @math -VAE, is more suitable for capturing data with a hyperspherical latent structure, while outperforming a normal, @math -VAE, in low dimensions on other data types.
The most general implementation of the second model type was proposed by @cite_9 , who introduced a suite of models to improve cluster performance of high-dimensional data based on mixture of vMF distributions. They showed that reducing an object representation to its directional components increases clusterability over standard methods like @math -Means or Latent Dirichlet Allocation .
@cite_9
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This paper presents a detailed empirical study of 12 generative approaches to text clustering, obtained by applying four types of document-to-cluster assignment strategies (hard, stochastic, soft and deterministic annealing (DA) based assignments) to each of three base models, namely mixtures of multivariate Bernoulli, multinomial, and von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distributions. A large variety of text collections, both with and without feature selection, are used for the study, which yields several insights, including (a) showing situations wherein the vMF-centric approaches, which are based on directional statistics, fare better than multinomial model-based methods, and (b) quantifying the trade-off between increased performance of the soft and DA assignments and their increased computational demands. We also compare all the model-based algorithms with two state-of-the-art discriminative approaches to document clustering based, respectively, on graph partitioning (CLUTO) and a spectral coclustering method. Overall, DA and CLUTO perform the best but are also the most computationally expensive. The vMF models provide good performance at low cost while the spectral coclustering algorithm fares worse than vMF-based methods for a majority of the datasets. We study a variant of the variational autoencoder model (VAE) with a Gaussian mixture as a prior distribution, with the goal of performing unsupervised clustering through deep generative models. We observe that the known problem of over-regularisation that has been shown to arise in regular VAEs also manifests itself in our model and leads to cluster degeneracy. We show that a heuristic called minimum information constraint that has been shown to mitigate this effect in VAEs can also be applied to improve unsupervised clustering performance with our model. Furthermore we analyse the effect of this heuristic and provide an intuition of the various processes with the help of visualizations. Finally, we demonstrate the performance of our model on synthetic data, MNIST and SVHN, showing that the obtained clusters are distinct, interpretable and result in achieving competitive performance on unsupervised clustering to the state-of-the-art results. High dimensional directional data is becoming increasingly important in contemporary applications such as analysis of text and gene-expression data. A natural model for multi-variate directional data is provided by the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution on the unit hypersphere that is analogous to the multi-variate Gaussian distribution in Rd. In this paper, we propose modeling complex directional data as a mixture of vMF distributions. We derive and analyze two variants of the Expectation Maximization (EM) framework for estimating the parameters of this mixture. We also propose two clustering algorithms corresponding to these variants. An interesting aspect of our methodology is that the spherical kmeans algorithm (kmeans with cosine similarity) can be shown to be a special case of both our algorithms. Thus, modeling text data by vMF distributions lends theoretical validity to the use of cosine similarity which has been widely used by the information retrieval community. As part of experimental validation, we present results on modeling high-dimensional text and gene-expression data as a mixture of vMF distributions. The results indicate that our approach yields superior clusterings especially for difficult clustering tasks in high-dimensional spaces. Mining useful clusters from high dimensional data have received significant attention of the computer vision and pattern recognition community in the recent years. Linear and nonlinear dimensionality reduction has played an important role to overcome the curse of dimensionality. However, often such methods are accompanied with three different problems: high computational complexity (usually associated with the nuclear norm minimization), nonconvexity (for matrix factorization methods), and susceptibility to gross corruptions in the data. In this paper, we propose a principal component analysis (PCA) based solution that overcomes these three issues and approximates a low-rank recovery method for high dimensional datasets. We target the low-rank recovery by enforcing two types of graph smoothness assumptions, one on the data samples and the other on the features by designing a convex optimization problem. The resulting algorithm is fast, efficient, and scalable for huge datasets with O(n log(n)) computational complexity in the number of data samples. It is also robust to gross corruptions in the dataset as well as to the model parameters. Clustering experiments on 7 benchmark datasets with different types of corruptions and background separation experiments on 3 video datasets show that our proposed model outperforms 10 state-of-the-art dimensionality reduction models. Our theoretical analysis proves that the proposed model is able to recover approximate low-rank representations with a bounded error for clusterable data.