SCPP: A Unified Python Library for Soft Clustering

Kiyan Rezaee; Morteza Ziabakhsh; Artin Bahrampour; Seyed Mohammad Ghoreishi; Asal Khaje; Ali Sajedifar; Manny Chalak; Ava Zerafatangiz

cs.LGJul 21, 2026

SCPP: A Unified Python Library for Soft Clustering

Authors: Kiyan Rezaee, Morteza Ziabakhsh, Artin Bahrampour, Seyed Mohammad Ghoreishi, Asal Khaje, Ali Sajedifar, Manny Chalak, Ava Zerafatangiz, +1 more

Abstract

In this paper, we present SCPP (Soft Clustering Python Package), an open-source Python framework for soft clustering. SCPP establishes a canonical, scikit-learn-compatible estimator interface that standardizes model training, prediction, membership representation, evaluation, and benchmarking across heterogeneous soft clustering methods, including fuzzy, probabilistic, graph-based, matrix factorization, and deep learning methods. The framework currently integrates 40 representative algorithms together with a comprehensive benchmarking comprising datasets, clustering quality metrics, and standardized runtime, memory, and scalability evaluation. SCPP further provides extensive documentation, practical examples, automated testing, and seamless integration with the scientific Python ecosystem, enabling reproducible experimentation and straightforward extension with new algorithms. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/soft-clustering/soft-clustering.

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May 28, 2026 · cs.LGJ/K move · Enter open · S save

CLUBench: A Clustering Benchmark

Feng Xiao, Dazhi Fu, Chris Ding, Jicong Fan

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)

Clustering is a fundamental problem in data science with a long-standing research history, yielding numerous insightful algorithms. Despite this progress, a systematic and large-scale empirical evaluation that jointly considers conventional algorithms, deep learning-based methods, and recent foundation model-based clustering remains largely absent, leading to limited guidance on algorithm selection and deployment. To address this gap, we introduce CLUBench, a comprehensive clustering benchmark comprising 24 algorithms of diverse principles evaluated on 131 datasets across tabular, text, and image data, involving 178,815 experiments. Importantly, our analyses of (i) the impact of hyperparameter tuning,(ii) the impact of data types and characteristics,(iii) the impact of pretrained embeddings,(iv) large language model-based clustering,(v) the similarity of algorithms, and (vi) the low-rank structures of performance matrices, yield meaningful insights and promising pathways for clustering research. For instance, our study reveals that: 1) All evaluated deep clustering methods do not exhibit a significant advantage compared with the top-performing conventional clustering algorithms (e.g., KMeans, SpeClu) in terms of average performance; 2) For image and text clustering tasks, combining pretrained embeddings with conventional clustering algorithms (e.g., KMeans, SpeClu) offers effective and efficient clustering; 3) Clustering remains a challenging and nontrivial problem, even in the era of increasingly dominant foundation models. Moreover, we propose to use the low-rank structure in cross-model performance matrices to efficiently approximate the overall performance evaluation in practical applications. We further demonstrate the feasibility of model selection based on the performance matrices across all hyperparameter configurations.

Image Clustering Low-Rank Factorization

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Abstract

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CLUBench: A Clustering Benchmark

Soft Learning

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