DIVA: A Dirichlet Process Mixtures Based Incremental Deep Clustering Algorithm via Variational Auto-Encoder

Abstract: Generative model-based deep clustering frameworks excel in classifying complex data, but are limited in handling dynamic and complex features because they require prior knowledge of the number of clusters. In this paper, we propose a nonparametric deep clustering framework that employs an infinite mixture of Gaussians as a prior. Our framework utilizes a memoized online variational inference method that enables the "birth" and "merge" moves of clusters, allowing our framework to cluster data in a "dynamic-adaptive" manner, without requiring prior knowledge of the number of features. We name the framework as DIVA, a Dirichlet Process-based Incremental deep clustering framework via Variational Auto-Encoder. Our framework, which outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, exhibits superior performance in classifying complex data with dynamically changing features, particularly in the case of incremental features. We released our source code implementation at: https://github.com/Ghiara/diva