Robust Categorical Data Clustering Guided by Multi-Granular Competitive Learning
Categorical data pose significant clustering challenges due to the absence of a well-defined distance metric, particularly when they exhibit multi-granular nested cluster structures. To address this, this work proposes a Multi-Granular Competitive Penalty Learning (MGCPL) mechanism that adaptively refines cluster structures in stages, integrated with a Cluster Aggregation and Metric Embedding (CAME) strategy based on learned distributions to enable robust clustering in the embedding space. This approach is the first to incorporate multi-granular competitive learning into categorical data modeling, offering both automatic granularity discovery and linear time complexity, thereby supporting scalability to large-scale datasets and compatibility with distributed pre-partitioning. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate its significant superiority over existing methods.