A Framework for Actionable Clustering Using Constraint Programming

Consider if you wish to cluster your ego network in Facebook so as to find several useful groups each of which you can invite to a different dinner party. You may require that each cluster must contain equal number of males and females, that the width of a cluster in terms of age is at most 10 and that each person in a cluster should have at least r other people with the same hobby. These are examples of cardinality, geometric and density requirements/constraints respectfully that can make the clustering useful for a given purpose. However existing formulations of constrained clustering were not designed to handle these constraints since they typically deal with low-level, instance-level constraints. We formulate a constraint programming (CP) languages formulation of clustering with these cluster-level styles of constraints which we call actionable clustering. Experimental results show the potential uses of this work to make clustering more actionable. We also show that these constraints can be used to improve the accuracy of semi-supervised clustering.