An Information-Theoretic Framework for High-Order Co-clustering of Heterogeneous Objects

The high-order co-clustering problem, i.e., the problem of simultaneously clustering several heterogeneous types of domains, is usually faced by minimizing a linear combination of some optimization functions evaluated over pairs of correlated domains, where each weight expresses the reliability/relevance of the associated contingency table. Clearly enough, accurately choosing these weights is crucial to the effectiveness of the co-clustering, and techniques for their automatic tuning are particularly desirable, which are instead missing in the literature. This paper faces this issue by proposing an information-theoretic framework where the co-clustering problem does not need any explicit weighting scheme for combining pairwise objective functions, while a suitable notion of agreement among these functions is exploited. Based on this notion, an algorithm for co-clustering a "star-structured" collection of domains is defined.