The blind men and the elephant: on meeting the problem of multiple truths in data from clustering and pattern mining perspectives

In this position paper, we discuss how different branches of research on clustering and pattern mining, while rather different at first glance, in fact have a lot in common and can learn a lot from each other’s solutions and approaches. We give brief introductions to the fundamental problems of different sub-fields of clustering, especially focusing on subspace clustering, ensemble clustering, alternative (as a variant of constraint) clustering, and multiview clustering (as a variant of alternative clustering). Second, we relate a representative of these areas, subspace clustering, to pattern mining. We show that, while these areas use different vocabularies and intuitions, they share common roots and they are exposed to essentially the same fundamental problems; in particular, we detail how certain problems currently faced by the one field, have been solved by the other field, and vice versa. The purpose of our survey is to take first steps towards bridging the linguistic gap between different (sub-) communities and to make researchers from different fields aware of the existence of similar problems (and, partly, of similar solutions or of solutions that could be transferred) in the literature on the other research topic.