thelatent.space - Deep Clustering (with a CV-AE) on MNIST

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  Generated MNIST digits using random weights

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  3D scatter plot of clusters in 3 of the 50 latent dimensions

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  3D scatter plot of clusters in 3 of the 50 latent dimensions

Inspiration

Supervised learning is given so much attention in the world of deep learning that we often forget about unsupervised methods.

What it does

I've implemented a version of Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC) in a Google Colab notebook that clusters the MNIST dataset with 89% unsupervised cluster accuracy. This is in contrast to the 52% achieved with PCA to n-dimensions and KMeans. The current design is a variational autoencoder that compresses the input data to 50-dimensional latent space before assigning cluster centres with KMeans and computing KL divergence.

How I built it

With an awful lot of reading, as well as a fair bit of battling with TensorFlow.

Challenges I ran into

I realised 14 hours in I'd built my loss metrics incorrectly.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I managed to produce a model that performs better than traditional clustering methods.

What I learned

How to install LaTeX for Windows. How to create custom layers for TensorFlow

What's next for Deep Clustering (with a Conv-Vari Autoencoder) on MNIST

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Built With

• google-cloud
• google-colab
• python
• tensorflow