Convex Covariate Clustering for Classification

Clustering, like covariate selection for classification, is an important step to understand and interpret the data. However, clustering of covariates is often performed independently of the classification step, which can lead to undesirable clustering results. Therefore, we propose a method that can cluster covariates while taking into account class label information of samples. We formulate the problem as a convex optimization problem which uses both, a-priori similarity information between covariates, and information from class-labeled samples. Like convex clustering [Chi and Lange, 2015], the proposed method offers a unique global minima making it insensitive to initialization. In order to solve the convex problem, we propose a specialized alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), which scales up to several thousands of variables. Furthermore, in order to circumvent computationally expensive cross-validation, we propose a model selection criterion based on approximate marginal likelihood estimation. Experiments on synthetic and real data confirm the usefulness of the proposed clustering method and the selection criterion.