Clustering with side information: Further efforts to improve efficiency

This paper examines the issues of constrained clustering and active selection of clustering constraints in a unified approach. A fuzzy clustering method specially crafted to deal with non-spherical clusters and explicit pairwise constraints is proposed in this paper as a core clustering method. An active method for constraints selection is embedded into the core clustering method for querying beneficial constraints during clustering. The proposed approach has two major advantages relative to traditional methods. First, it considers the dependency of constraints effectiveness on the clustering algorithm by unifying both clustering and constraints selection in a uniform, principled framework. Second, a constraints selection method is embedded into the core clustering method based on the fact that constraints will be more useful if they are selected according to the current state of clustering. Experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method.