Clustering time-stamped data using multiple nonnegative matrices factorization

Time-stamped data are ubiquitous in our daily life, such as twitter data, academic papers and sensor data. Finding clusters and their evolutionary trends in time-stamped data sets are receiving increasing attention from researchers. Most existing methods, however, can only tackle the clustering problem of a data set without time-stamped information which is inherent in almost all the data objects. Actually, not only the performance can be improved by effectively incorporating the time-stamped information in the clustering process on most data sets, but also we can find the evolutionary trends of the clusters with time information. In this paper, we introduce an approach for clustering time-stamped data and discovering the evolutionary trends of the clusters by using Multiple Nonnegative Matrices Factorization (MNMF) with smooth constraint over time. To utilize time-stamped information in the clustering process, an extra object-time matrix is constructed in our proposed method. Then, we jointly factorize multiple feature matrices using smooth constraint to perform the object-time matrix to obtain the clusters and their evolutionary trends. Experimental results on real data sets demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms the comparative algorithms with respect to Fscore, NMI or Entropy.