Dissimilarity Random Forest Clustering
Manuele Bicego · 2020
In this paper we present DisRFC (Dissimilarity Random Forest Clustering), a novel Random Forest Clustering approach which, contrarily to current methods which require in input a vectorial representation, works only with dissimilarities, thus being applicable also to all those problems where a vectorial representation is not available but a descriptive dissimilarity measure can be computed. In the DisRFC approach objects to be clustered are first modelled with a novel RF variant called Unsupervised Dissimilarity Random Forest (UD-RF), which functioning mechanisms are both unsupervised and based on dissimilarities. The trained UD-RF is then used to project objects in a binary vectorial space, where effective K-means procedures can be used to obtain the final clustering. In the paper we present different variants of DisRFC, thoroughly and positively evaluated using 10 different problems.