K-MEAP: Multiple Exemplars Affinity Propagation With Specified $K$ Clusters

Recently, an attractive clustering approach named multiexemplar affinity propagation (MEAP) has been proposed as an extension to the single exemplar-based AP. MEAP is able to automatically identify multiple exemplars for each cluster associated with a superexemplar. However, if the cluster number is a prior knowledge and can be specified by the user, MEAP is unable to make use of such knowledge directly in its learning process. Instead, it has to rely on rerunning the process as many times as it takes by tuning parameters until it generates the desired number of clusters. The process of MEAP rerunning may be very time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a new clustering algorithm called Multiple Exemplars Affinity Propagation with Specified K Clusters which is able to generate specified K clusters directly while retaining the advantages of MEAP. Two kinds of new additional messages are introduced in K-MEAP in order to control the number of clusters in the process of message passing. Detailed problem formulation, derived messages, and in-depth analysis of the proposed K-MEAP are provided. Experimental studies on 11 real-world data sets with different kinds of applications demonstrate that K-MEAP not only generates K clusters directly and efficiently without tuning parameters but also outperforms related approaches in terms of clustering accuracy.