Constraint Selection by Committee: An Ensemble Approach to Identifying Informative Constraints for Semi-supervised Clustering

A number of clustering algorithms have been proposed for use in tasks where a limited degree of supervision is available. This prior knowledge is frequently provided in the form of pairwise must-link and cannot-link constraints. While the incorporation of pairwise supervision has the potential to improve clustering accuracy, the composition and cardinality of the constraint sets can significantly impact upon the level of improvement. We demonstrate that it is often possible to correctly “guess” a large number of constraints without supervision from the coassociations between pairs of objects in an ensemble of clusterings. Along the same lines, we establish that constraints based on pairs with uncertain co-associations are particularly informative, if known. An evaluation on text data shows that this provides an effective criterion for identifying constraints, leading to a reduction in the level of supervision required to direct a clustering algorithm to an accurate solution.