cs.LGAug 11, 2025

Shapley-Inspired Feature Weighting in kk-means with No Additional Hyperparameters

Authors: Richard J. FawleyRenato Cordeiro de Amorim

Organizations: School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Wivenhoe, UK.

Abstract

Clustering algorithms often assume all features contribute equally to the data structure, an assumption that usually fails in high-dimensional or noisy settings. Feature weighting methods can address this, but most require additional parameter tuning. We propose SHARK (Shapley Reweighted kk-means), a feature-weighted clustering algorithm motivated by the use of Shapley values from cooperative game theory to quantify feature relevance, which requires no additional parameters beyond those in kk-means. We prove that the kk-means objective can be decomposed into a sum of per-feature Shapley values, providing an axiomatic foundation for unsupervised feature relevance and reducing Shapley computation from exponential to polynomial time. SHARK iteratively re-weights features by the inverse of their Shapley contribution, emphasising informative dimensions and down-weighting irrelevant ones, and is equivalent to replacing the arithmetic mean of feature dispersions with their harmonic mean. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets show that SHARK consistently matches or outperforms existing methods, achieving superior robustness and accuracy, particularly in scenarios where noise may be present. Software: https://github.com/rickfawley/SHARK.

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