Non-redundant clustering with conditional ensembles

Abstract

Data may often contain multiple plausible clusterings. In order to discover a clustering which is useful to the user, constrained clustering techniques have been proposed to guide the search. Typically, these techniques assume background knowledge in the form of explicit information about the desired clustering. In contrast, we consider the setting in which the background knowledge is instead about an undesired clustering. Such knowledge may be obtained from an existing classification or precedent algorithm. The problem is then to find a novel, orthogonal clustering in the data. We present a general algorithmic framework which makes use of cluster ensemble methods to solve this problem. One key advantage of this approach is that it takes a base clustering method which is used as a black box, allowing the practitioner to select the most appropriate clustering method for the domain. We present experimental results on synthetic and text data which establish the competitiveness of this framework.