Robust Continuous Co-Clustering

Clustering consists of grouping together samples giving their similar properties. The problem of modeling simultaneously groups of samples and features is known as Co-Clustering. This paper introduces ROCCO - a Robust Continuous Co-Clustering algorithm. ROCCO is a scalable, hyperparameter-free, easy and ready to use algorithm to address Co-Clustering problems in practice over massive cross-domain datasets. It operates by learning a graph-based two-sided representation of the input matrix. The underlying proposed optimization problem is non-convex, which assures a flexible pool of solutions. Moreover, we prove that it can be solved with a near linear time complexity on the input size. An exhaustive large-scale experimental testbed conducted with both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrates ROCCO's properties in practice: (i) State-of-the-art performance in cross-domain real-world problems including Biomedicine and Text Mining; (ii) very low sensitivity to hyperparameter settings; (iii) robustness to noise and (iv) a linear empirical scalability in practice. These results highlight ROCCO as a powerful general-purpose co-clustering algorithm for cross-domain practitioners, regardless of their technical background.