NeurCAM: Interpretable Neural Clustering via Additive Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interpretable clustering algorithms aim to group similar data points while explaining the obtained groups to support knowledge discovery and pattern recognition tasks. While most approaches to interpretable clustering construct clusters using decision trees, the interpretability of trees often deteriorates on complex problems where large trees are required. In this work, we introduce the Neural Clustering Additive Model (NeurCAM), a novel approach to the interpretable clustering problem that leverages neural generalized additive models to provide fuzzy cluster membership with additive explanations of the obtained clusters. To promote sparsity in our model’s explanations, we introduce selection gates that explicitly limit the number of features and pairwise interactions leveraged. Additionally, we demonstrate the capacity of our model to perform text clustering that considers the contextual representation of the texts while providing explanations for the obtained clusters based on uni- or bi-word terms. Extensive experiments show that NeurCAM achieves performance comparable to black-box methods on tabular datasets while remaining interpretable. Additionally, our approach significantly outperforms other interpretable clustering approaches when clustering on text data.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".