Semi-supervised learning with centerless clustering

Clustering is often considered as an unsupervised data analysis method, but making full use of the prior information in the process of clustering will significantly improve the performance of the clustering algorithm. Spectral clustering algorithm can well use the prior pairwise constraint information to cluster and has become a new hot spot of machine learning research in recent years. In this paper, we propose an effective clustering algorithm, called a semi-supervised spectral clustering algorithm based on pairwise constraints, in which the similarity matrix of data points is adjusted and optimized by pairwise constraints. The experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm.

During the past few years, semi-supervised clustering has emerged as a new interesting direction in machine learning research. In a semi-supervised clustering algorithm, the clustering results can be significantly improved by using side information, which is available or collected from users. There are two main kinds of side information that can be learned in semi-supervised clustering algorithms: the class labels - called seeds or the pairwise constraints. The first semi-supervised clustering was introduced in 2000, and since that, many algorithms have been presented in literature. However, it is not easy to use both types of side information in the same algorithm. To address the problem, this paper proposes a semi-supervised graph based clustering algorithm that tries to use seeds and constraints in the clustering process, called MCSSGC. Moreover, we introduces a simple but efficient active learning method to collect the constraints that can boost the performance of MCSSGC, named KMMFFQS. In order to verify effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we conducted a series of experiments not only on real data sets from UCI, but also on a document data set applied in an Information Extraction of Vietnamese documents. These obtained results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the clustering process compared to some recent algorithms.

This paper presents semi-supervised agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm using clusterwise tolerance based pairwise constraints. In semi-supervised clustering, pairwise constraints, that is, must-link and cannot-link, are frequently used in order to improve clustering properties. From that sense, we will propose another way named clusterwise tolerance based pairwise constraints to handle must-link and cannot-link constraints inL2-space. In addition, we will propose semi-supervised agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm based on it. We will, moreover, show the effectiveness of the proposed method through numerical examples.

Semi-supervised clustering leverages side information such as pairwise constraints to guide clustering procedures. Despite promising progress, existing semi-supervised clustering approaches overlook the condition of side information being generated sequentially, which is a natural setting arising in numerous real-world applications such as social network and e-commerce system analysis. Given emerged new constraints, classical semi-supervised clustering algorithms need to re-optimize their objectives over all data samples and constraints in availability, which prevents them from efficiently updating the obtained data partitions. To address this challenge, we propose an efficient dynamic semi-supervised clustering framework that casts the clustering problem into a search problem over a feasible convex set, i.e., a convex hull with its extreme points being an ensemble of m data partitions. According to the principle of ensemble clustering, the optimal partition lies in the convex hull, and can thus be uniquely represented by an m-dimensional probability simplex vector. As such, the dynamic semi-supervised clustering problem is simplified to the problem of updating a probability simplex vector subject to the newly received pairwise constraints. We then develop a computationally efficient updating procedure to update the probability simplex vector in O(m2) time, irrespective of the data size n. Our empirical studies on several real-world benchmark datasets show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art semi-supervised clustering algorithms with visible performance gain and significantly reduced running time.

Semi-supervised clustering has been widely explored in the last years. In this paper, we present HCAC-ML (Hierarchical Confidence-based Active Clustering with Metric Learning), an innovative approach for this task which employs distance metric learning through cluster-level constraints. HCAC-ML is based on the HCAC algorithm, an state-of-the-art algorithm for hierarchical semi-supervised clustering that uses an active learning approach for inserting cluster-level constraints. These constraints are presented to a variation of ITML (Information-theoretic Metric Learning) algorithm to learn a Mahalanobis-like distance function. We compared HCAC-ML with other semi-supervised clustering algorithms in 26 different datasets. Results indicate that HCAC-ML outperforms other algorithms in most of the scenarios, but specially when the number of constraints is small. This makes HCAC-ML useful in practical applications.

An efficient semi-supervised balanced cut with hard pairwise constraints and partial labels

Semi-supervised cluster ensemble usually introduces a small amount of supervision in the first stage of cluster ensemble, i.e., ensemble generation, by performing many runs of semi-supervised clustering algorithms. However, it is neither efficient in terms of computational complexity, nor flexible in a dynamic learning environment where limited supervision changes over time. In this article we propose a new framework which generates base partitions in an unsupervised manner and attributes different weights to each cluster of the base partitions. The weighting scheme considers both the internal validation measures of clustering and the degrees of satisfaction of pairwise constraints. A weighted co-association matrix based consensus approach is then applied to achieve a final partition. To handle high-dimensional data, we generate base partitions using k-means with both random sampling and random subspace techniques. The new framework retains a high accuracy, and is efficient since it avoids performing semi-supervised clustering in ensemble generation and the complexity of the weighting scheme is independent of the number of instances in a dynamic environment. It is more adaptive than the traditional approach because it does not require rerunning semi-supervised clustering algorithms when the limited supervision changes. Empirical results on 12 datasets demonstrate that it is also more robust to noisy constraints.

In this paper, a novel semi-supervised subtractive clustering method using pair wise constraints is proposed. Because the traditional subtractive clustering method cannot obtain the better clustering accuracies, some pair wise constraints regarded as supervised information are applied to aiding the process of the traditional subtractive clustering. Experimental results show that the new presented semi-supervised clustering method can improve the clustering performance significantly compared to the unsupervised subtractive clustering.

Semi-supervised clustering takes advantage of a small amount of labeled data to bring a great benefit to the clustering of unlabeled data. Based on a locality sensitive k-means clustering method, this paper presents two novel semi-supervised clustering algorithms inspired by the semi-supervised variants of the k-means clustering by seeding. To investigate the effectiveness of our approaches, experiments are done on one artificial dataset and three real datasets. Experimental results show that two proposed methods can improve the clustering performance significantly compared to other unsupervised and semi-supervised clustering algorithms.

Dental X-ray image segmentation has an important role in practical dentistry and is widely used in the discovery of odontological diseases, tooth archeology and in automated dental identification systems. Enhancing the accuracy of dental segmentation is the main focus of researchers, involving various machine learning methods to be applied in order to gain the best performance. However, most of the currently used methods are facing problems of threshold, curve functions, choosing suitable parameters and detecting common boundaries among clusters. In this paper, we will present a new semi-supervised fuzzy clustering algorithm named as SSFC-FS based on Interactive Fuzzy Satisficing for the dental X-ray image segmentation problem. Firstly, features of a dental X-Ray image are modeled into a spatial objective function, which are then to be integrated into a new semi-supervised fuzzy clustering model. Secondly, the Interactive Fuzzy Satisficing method, which is considered as a useful tool to solve linear and nonlinear multi-objective problems in mixed fuzzy-stochastic environment, is applied to get the cluster centers and the membership matrix of the model. Thirdly, theoretically validation of the solutions including the convergence rate, bounds of parameters, and the comparison with solutions of other relevant methods is performed. Lastly, a new semi-supervised fuzzy clustering algorithm that uses an iterative strategy from the formulae of solutions is designed. This new algorithm was experimentally validated and compared with the relevant ones in terms of clustering quality on a real dataset including 56 dental X-ray images in the period 2014–2015 of Hanoi Medial University, Vietnam. The results revealed that the new algorithm has better clustering quality than other methods such as Fuzzy C-Means, Otsu, eSFCM, SSCMOO, FMMBIS and another version of SSFC-FS with the local Lagrange method named SSFC-SC. We also suggest the most appropriate values of parameters for the new algorithm.

Semi-supervised clustering is a special form of classification that uses a large amount of unlabeled data together with labeled data to achieve better classification results. This paper introduces a semi-supervised fuzzy clustering algorithm of relational data with multiple prototype representation (SS-CLAMP) that aims to furnish a partition and a set of prototypes for each fuzzy cluster as well as to learn a relevance weight for each dissimilarity matrix by optimizing an adequacy criterion that measures the fit between the fuzzy clusters and their representatives in a competitive way and that takes into account pairwise constraints must-link and cannot-link. Experiments with real-valued data sets show the usefulness of the proposed algorithm.

Semi-supervised clustering takes advantage of some labeled data called seeds to bring a great benefit to the clustering of unlabeled data. This paper presents a novel semi-supervised clustering method based on one-class support vector machine, which applies a novel decision rule to assigning the class label to one data point. To investigate the effectiveness of our approach, experiments are done on one artificial data set and two real datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the clustering performance significantly compared to other semi-supervised clustering algorithms when using a very small amount of seeds.

In this paper we study the use of a semi-supervised agglomerative hierarchical clustering (ssAHC) algorithm to text categorization, which consists of assigning text documents to predefined categories. ssAHC is (i) a clustering algorithm that (ii) uses a finite design set of labeled data to (iii) help agglomerative hierarchical clustering (AHC) algorithms partition a finite set of unlabeled data and then (iv) terminates without the capability to label other objects. We first describe the text representation method we use in this work; we then present a feature selection method that is used to reduce the dimensionality of the feature space. Finally, we apply the ssAHC algorithm to the Reuters database of documents and show that its performance is superior to the Bayes classifier and to the Expectation-Maximization algorithm combined with Bayes classifier. We showed also that ssAHC helps AHC techniques to improve their performance. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

An Improved Semi-Supervised Clustering Algorithm for Multi-Density Datasets with Fewer Constraints

Semi-supervised clustering methods are applied in various fields. However, these methods have the limitations when the size of data is large. Thus, distributed clustering models are proposed. By separating data set into some parts, distributed models overcome the challenges of big size dataset. In this paper, a novel model, based on semi-supervised fuzzy clustering and distributed mechanism, is proposed. In our research, the method to define distributed additional information is introduced. This additional information is used to implement distributed semi-supervised fuzzy clustering model on three datasets. The main contribution in this paper is the proposal of distributed semi-supervised fuzzy clustering algorithm (denoted as DSSFCM) that performs on Master – Slave model on homogeneous datasets.