Multi-task clustering improves the clustering performance of each task by transferring knowledge among the related tasks. An important aspect of multi-task clustering is to assess the task relatedness. However, to our knowledge, only two previous works have assessed the task relatedness, but they both have limitations. In this paper, we propose two multi-task clustering methods for partially related tasks: the self-adapted multi-task clustering (SAMTC) method and the manifold regularized coding multi-task clustering (MRCMTC) method, which can automatically identify and transfer related instances among the tasks, thus avoiding negative transfer. Both SAMTC and MRCMTC construct the similarity matrix for each target task by exploiting useful information from the source tasks through related instances transfer, and adopt spectral clustering to get the final clustering results. But they learn the related instances from the source tasks in different ways.

Multi-task Clustering, Partially Related Tasks, Negative Transfer, Instance Transfer

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