arXiv Machine Learning

Fed-BRDECS: Privacy-Preserving and Heterogeneity-Aware Federated Deep Embedded Clustering

Fed-BRDECS is a federated deep embedded clustering framework that protects client privacy by replacing globally normalized clustering objectives with a locally computable sample‑stability loss, eliminating the need to share sensitive soft‑assignment distributions. It addresses non‑IID client data through prediction‑balanced sampling, which oversamples rare predicted clusters, and centroid‑level restarting, which refreshes biased or inactive centroids. Experiments on image, text, and time‑series datasets demonstrate that Fed‑BRDECS outperforms existing federated and deep clustering methods while adding no inference‑time cost for anomaly detection.

arXiv AI
Sep 21

Federated Deep Clustering Networks for High-Dimensional and Heterogeneous Data

The paper introduces FedDCN, a federated deep clustering network that jointly optimizes reconstruction and clustering losses for high‑dimensional, heterogeneous data. It addresses challenges of non‑IID client data by generating synthetic augmentations and applying geometric regularization to align latent spaces. Experiments show the method’s effectiveness under both IID and non‑IID settings, and the authors outline future research directions.

By Morris Stallmann, Charalampos S. Kouzinopoulos, Marcin Pietrasik, Anna Wilbik
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Evolving Federated Density Peak Clustering with Shuffler-Based Anonymization

The paper introduces Evolving Federated Density Peak Clustering (eFDPC), a one‑shot federated clustering method that merges evolving fuzzy data‑stream clustering with density peak clustering. Each client independently updates micro‑clusters from private mini‑batches, and only selected density peaks are sent to the server, reducing communication. A shuffler‑based anonymization layer protects client contributions, and two variants—eFDPC‑P and eFDPC‑G—are evaluated on synthetic and real datasets, outperforming recent federated clustering baselines in one‑shot settings and handling high‑dimensional, non‑IID data.

By Miha O\v{z}bot, Seiichi Ozawa, Igor \v{S}krjanc
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26

How to Achieve the Intended Aim of Deep Clustering Now, without Deep Learning

The paper examines whether Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC) truly overcomes the fundamental limitations of k‑means clustering, such as handling clusters of arbitrary shapes, varied sizes, and densities. Through analysis, it finds that DEC does not exploit the underlying data distribution and therefore fails to address these limitations. Instead, a non‑deep learning approach that leverages distributional information of clusters can achieve the intended goals of deep clustering.

By Kai Ming Ting, Wei-Jie Xu, Hang Zhang