Medoid Determination in Deterministic Annealing-based Pairwise Clustering

The deterministic annealing-based clustering algorithm is an EM-based algorithm which behaves like simulated annealing method, yet less sensitive to the initialization of parameters. Pairwise clustering is a kind of clustering technique to perform clustering with inter-entity distance information but not enforcing to have detailed attribute information. The pairwise deterministic annealing-based clustering algorithm repeatedly alternates the steps of estimation of mean-fields and the update of membership degrees of data objects to clusters until termination condition holds. Lacking of attribute value information, pairwise clustering algorithms do not explicitly determine the centroids or medoids of clusters in the course of clustering process or at the end of the process. This paper proposes a method to identify the medoids as the centers of formed clusters for the pairwise deterministic annealing-based clustering algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed method locate meaningful medoids.