Semi-supervised clustering by selecting informative constraints

Abstract

Traditional clustering algorithms use a predefined metric and no supervision in identifying the partition. Existing semi-supervised clustering approaches either learn a metric from randomly chosen constraints or actively select informative constraints using a generic distance measure like Euclidean norm. We tackle the problem of identifying constraints that are informative to learn appropriate metric for semi-supervised clustering. We propose an approach to simultaneously find out appropriate constraints and learn a metric to boost the clustering performance. We evaluate clustering quality of our approach using the learned metric on the MNIST handwritten digits, Caltech-256 and MSRC2 object image datasets. Our results on these datasets have significant improvements over the baseline methods like MPCK-MEANS. © Springer-Verlag 2013.