Graph based clustering with constraints and active learning

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.