Abstract:The main limitation of most traditional clustering methods is that they cannot effectively deal with the insufficient datasets in target domain. It is desirable to develop new cluster algorithms which can leverage useful information in the source domain to guide the clustering performance in the target domain so that appropriate number of clusters and high quality clustering result can be obtained in this situation. In this paper, a clustering algorithm called transfer affinity propagation (TAP) is proposed for the insufficient dataset scenarios. The new algorithm improves the clustering performance when the distribution of source and target domains are similar. The basic idea of TAP is to modify the update rules about two message propagations, used in affinity propagation (AP), through leveraging statistical property and geometric structure together. With the corresponding factor graph, TAP indeed can be applied to cluster in AP-like transfer learning, i.e., TAP can abstract the knowledge of source domains through the two tricks to enhance the learning of target domain even if the data in the current scene are not adequate. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional algorithms in situations of insufficient data.