Hyperbolic Continuous Structural Entropy for Hierarchical Clustering (2512.00524v1)

Abstract: Hierarchical clustering is a fundamental machine-learning technique for grouping data points into dendrograms. However, existing hierarchical clustering methods encounter two primary challenges: 1) Most methods specify dendrograms without a global objective. 2) Graph-based methods often neglect the significance of graph structure, optimizing objectives on complete or static predefined graphs. In this work, we propose Hyperbolic Continuous Structural Entropy neural networks, namely HypCSE, for structure-enhanced continuous hierarchical clustering. Our key idea is to map data points in the hyperbolic space and minimize the relaxed continuous structural entropy (SE) on structure-enhanced graphs. Specifically, we encode graph vertices in hyperbolic space using hyperbolic graph neural networks and minimize approximate SE defined on graph embeddings. To make the SE objective differentiable for optimization, we reformulate it into a function using the lowest common ancestor (LCA) on trees and then relax it into continuous SE (CSE) by the analogy of hyperbolic graph embeddings and partitioning trees. To ensure a graph structure that effectively captures the hierarchy of data points for CSE calculation, we employ a graph structure learning (GSL) strategy that updates the graph structure during training. Extensive experiments on seven datasets demonstrate the superior performance of HypCSE.