Finding the appropriate number of clusters to which documents should be partitioned is crucial in document clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, namely DPMFP, to discover the latent cluster structure based on the DPM model without requiring the number of clusters as input. Document features are automatically partitioned into two groups, in particular, discriminative words and nondiscriminative words, and contribute differently to document clustering. A variational inference algorithm is investigated to infer the document collection structure as well as the partition of document words at the same time. Our experiments indicate that our proposed approach performs well on the synthetic data set as well as real data sets. The comparison between our approach and state-of-the-art document clustering approaches shows that our approach is robust and effective for document clustering.

One essential issue of document clustering is to estimate the appropriate number of clusters for a document collection to which documents should be partitioned. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, namely DPMFS, to address this issue. The proposed approach is designed 1) to group documents into a set of clusters while the number of document clusters is determined by the Dirichlet process mixture model automatically; 2) to identify the discriminative words and separate them from irrelevant noise words via stochastic search variable selection technique. We explore the performance of our proposed approach on both a synthetic dataset and several realistic document datasets. The comparison between our proposed approach and stage-of-the-art document clustering approaches indicates that our approach is robust and effective for document clustering.