3SHACC: Three stages hybrid agglomerative constrained clustering

Abstract

Traditionally within the unsupervised learning paradigm, hierarchical and partitional clustering techniques have been shown to produce better results when provided with partial information, leading to a renewed attention towards this topic. Constrained clustering is a semi-supervised learning problem that combines classic clustering techniques with background knowledge given in the form of a set of constraints. In this paper, we propose to incorporate constraints into the clustering process in three phases: the first phase is devoted to quantify constraint relevance and to learn a metric matrix according to such relevance, a second phase computing similarities between instances by means of the reconstruction coefficient and pairwise distances, and a third stage performing agglomerative hierarchical clustering with a reward-style stepped affinity function favoring merges satisfying the higher possible number of constraints. Experimental results, supported by Bayesian statistical testing, show a consistent improvement in favor of our proposal over previous approaches to the constrained clustering problem.