Graph based clustering with constraints and active learning

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  1. Journal of Computer Science and Cybernetics, V.37, N.1 (2021), 71–89 DOI 10.15625/1813-9663/37/1/15773 GRAPH BASED CLUSTERING WITH CONSTRAINTS AND ACTIVE LEARNING VU-TUAN DANG1, VIET-VU VU1,∗, HONG-QUAN DO1, THI KIEU OANH LE2 1VNU Information Technology Institute, Vietnam National University, Hanoi 2University of Economic and Technical Industries Abstract. 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 including class labels(seeds) or pairwise constraints. In this paper, we propose a semi- supervised graph based clustering algorithm that tries to use seeds and constraints in the clustering process, called MCSSGC. Moreover, we also introduce a simple but efficient active learning method to collect the constraints that can boost the performance of MCSSGC, named KMMFFQS. These obtained results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the clustering process compared to some recent algorithms. Keywords. Semi-supervised clustering; Active learning; Constraints. 1. INTRODUCTION Clustering is the task of partitioning a set of objects into clusters such that objects in the same cluster are similar to each other while objects in different clusters are dis- similar. Clustering is useful in a wide variety of applications, including image segmentation, data/text/web mining, and social science, to mention just a few. The process aims to discover the natural structure of the data, relationships between data and last but not least outliers detection. Over the last decades, the clustering topic has been widely studied with many clustering algorithms proposed in literature to work with different problem domains and sce- narios [55]. These include partition-based, density-based, graph-based, distance-based, and probability-based algorithms. Detailed surveys can be found in [24, 25, 55]. Among these researches, graph based clustering has grown more and more popular with many proposals in recent years [19, 42]. In general, clustering is usually performed when there is no variable outcome or nothing known about the relationship between observations in the data set. For this reason, clustering is traditionally seen as part of unsupervised learning. However, during the past few years, semi-supervised clustering has emerged as a new interesting direction in machine learning research. By using side information, which is available or queried from users, the clustering results can be improved [10]. It is also worth noting that a traditional clustering algorithm, e.g. K-Means, Fuzzy C-Means, DBSCAN, etc., does not works well for data sets with different shapes and sizes or with the presence of background noise. The semi-supervised *Corresponding author. E-mail address: vuvietvietnam@gmail.com (V.T.Dang); vuvietvu@.vnu.edu.vn (V.V. Vu); quandh.iti@gmail.com (H.Q.Do); ltkoanh@uneti.edu.vn (T.K.O. Le) © 2021 Vietnam Academy of Science & Technology
  2. 72 VU-TUAN DANG, et.al clustering algorithms, on the other hand, can efficiently tackle with these kinds of data sets [8, 9, 12, 16, 36, 37, 39, 43, 48, 50, 53, 57]. As mentioned in [27], side information is data that is neither from the input space nor from the output space of the function, but includes useful information to learn it. Side information is applied in many machine learning models such as Support Vector Machine [38], feature selection [56], Deep learning, etc. [27]. Given a data set X = {x1, x2, . . . , xn}, we review some concepts of side information in the context of semi-supervised clustering algorithms as follows: ˆ Must-link: A Must-link constraint specifies that two instances should be in the same cluster. ˆ Cannot-link: A Cannot-link constraint specifies that two instances should not be in the same cluster. ˆ Seed: A set S ∈ X is called the seed set if for all xi ∈ S, the user provides the label C of the cluster to which it belongs. Generally, we assume that for each cluster C of X, there is at least one seed-point xi ∈ S. Figure 1. illustrates the spectrum of different prior knowledge types that can be inte- grated in the process of classifying data. In the past two decades, many semi-supervised clustering have been proposed. It can be mentioned here the semi-supervised K-means [8, 9, 12, 16, 39], semi-supervised Fuzzy clustering [1, 11, 22, 35], semi-supervised spectral clustering [36, 37, 53], semi-supervised density based clustering [13, 31, 41], semi-supervised hierarchical clustering [17, 28], and semi-supervised graph based clustering [29, 45]. Al- though there are a lot of researches for semi-supervised clustering, however the problem of integrating both types of side information in the same algorithm is an interesting question [24]. Our previous work in 2019 [47] is probably one of the first work that integrated both kinds of side information in a density-based clustering. Figure 1. Spectrum of four kinds of machine learning including supervised (a), labelled (b), con- strained (c), and unsupervised (d). Dots are denoted for points without any labels; circles, asterisks and crosses are denoted for points with labels. In (c), solid and dashed lines are expressed for Must- and Cannot-link constraints respectively [30]. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised graph based clustering algorithm that can efficiently integrate constraints and seeds in the same clustering process. The contributions of our paper are detailed as follows:
  3. GRAPH BASED CLUSTERING WITH CONSTRAINTS 73 ˆ We develop a proper way that tries to combine the use of seeds in a graph partitioning process and the use of Must-link and Cannot-Link constraints in the clustering process in a unified graph-based model. We named our proposed semi-supervised graph-based clustering algorithm as MCSSGC. The preliminary work of this paper is presented in [46]. ˆ We introduce a new active learning method to collect constraints that can further improve the performance of MCSSGC. The short version is introduced in [51]. ˆ We carefully conducted experiments on UCI and real data set to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and method. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the related work about semi-supervised clustering algorithms. Section 3 proposes our new semi-supervised clustering algorithm embedding both kinds of side information (MCSSGC) and an active learning method to collect constraints for the MCSSGC. Section 4 reports the experiment results. Finally, Section 5 concludes our paper and proposes some future research directions. 2. RELATED WORK Semi-supervised clustering has attracted a lot of attention in the past two decades. Ta- ble 2. summarizes the method name, types of the constraints in current semi-supervised clustering algorithms. In the following sections, we present these methods in details. Enforcing methods In this method, user constraints will be integrated as support hints in the clustering process. For example, they can be used in the conditional of assigning points to clusters, in initializing centers at the first step of K-Means, or in voting clustering algorithms, etc. In [52], the COP-KMeans is presented, this is one of the newest constraint based cluster- ing algorithm. In the COP-KMeans, constraints are integrated in the clustering assignment loop. The clusters detected must satisfy all the provided user constraints. This algorithm has opened a direction for various researches to follow. In [8], the authors introduced a constraint based clustering algorithm using some labeled data points, named Seed K-Means. The seeds are used to initialize k centers for K-Means at the first step. In [3], the constraint graph based clustering is proposed. The constraints in this case are used to help the process of constructing k-NN graph. In [44], the Constraint Based Selection algorithm (CBS) is pre- sented. In the research, the authors used constraints in the voting process. Three principle algorithms including K-Means, DBSCAN and spectral clustering are used to produce clus- ters. After that, they select the best solution from a set of clusters that satisfies the largest number of given constraints. In [45], the seed graph based clustering is proposed. Using a k-NN graph to present the data set, the seeds are used in the partitioning process to form the connected components (principle clusters), i.e. each connected component contains at most one kind of seeds. The use of seeds brings benefits in finding the best solution of partitioning a graph into clusters. In [41], the constraint DBSCAN (C-DBSCAN) is introduced. The key idea of C-DBSCAN includes some steps as follows. Firstly, partitioning the data space into denser subspaces with the help of a KD-Tree. Secondly, from such the denser subspaces, we build a set of initial local clusters, which are groups of points within the leaf nodes of the
  4. 74 VU-TUAN DANG, et.al Table 1. Main semi-supervised clustering algorithms in literature (not exhausted works) ID Work #Side inf. used #Method 1 COP-KMeans (2001) ML, CL Enforcing constraints 2 SKM (2002) seeds Enforcing seeds 3 CCL (2002) ML, CL Metric learning 4 MPCK-Means (2004) ML, CL Metric learning 5 HCC (2004) ML, CL Enforcing constraints 6 CVQE (2004) ML, CL Penalty based 7 LCVQE (2006) ML, CL Penalty based 8 MDCA (2006) ML, CL Metric learning 9 AFCC (2008) ML, CL Metric learning 10 HISSCLU (2008) seeds Enforcing seeds 11 CDBSCAN (2009) ML, CL Enforcing constraints 12 SSDBSCAN (2009) seeds Enforcing seeds 13 MCLA (2009) ML, CL Enforcing constraints 14 SS-Kernel-kmeans (2009) ML, CL Enforcing constraints 15 KML (2010) ML, CL Metric learning 16 CECM (2012) ML, CL Metric learning 17 2SAT (2010) ML, CL, MD, MS SAT based method 18 CGC (2011) ML, CL Enforcing constraints 19 SECM (2014) seeds Enforcing seeds 20 CBS (2017) ML, CL Enforcing constraints 21 CPCC (2017) ML, CL CP based method 22 ILP-HC (2017) ML, CL ILP based method 23 CVQE+ (2018) ML, CL Penalty based 24 SSGC (2018) seeds Enforcing seeds 25 MCSSDBS (2019) ML, CL, seeds Enforcing seeds+constraints KD-tree, split them finely such that they satisfy those Cannot-Link constraints associated with their contents. Then, density-connected local clusters are merged and enforced using Must-Link constraints. Finally, the adjacent neighborhoods in a bottom-up fashion are also merged and enforced the remaining Cannot-Link constraints. By these steps, the constraints are enforced in the clustering processes. And hence, the clustering results will be improved. In [47], this is the first semi-supervised density-based clustering that tries to integrate seeds and constraints in the clustering process, named MCSSDBS. MCSSDBS uses a fully weighted graph to present data w.r.t users constraints. The process of detecting clusters is equivalent to the process of finding the Minimum Spanning Tree for each part of clusters. To find a part of a cluster, it starts at a seed point p1 and detect the MST until there is a seed point pn having a different label from p, assume that these points of MST are {p1, p2, pn}. At that
  5. GRAPH BASED CLUSTERING WITH CONSTRAINTS 75 point, we have to detect the edge (pi, pi+1) to separate the MST. We can use the constraints set (if existing a Cannot-Link constraints in the MST), an active learning process to get label from users for the pair (pi, pi+1) or using the largest value (pi, pi+1) of the MST. Finally, we will obtain a part of cluster that includes the points {p1, p2, pi}. The process of clustering will stop when all seeds have been examined. Penalty based methods The idea of these methods is that the clustering results may violate some user constraints. In [16], the CVQE (constrained vector quantization error) has been developed. Based on the objective function of K-Means algorithm, a new differentiable error function called the constrained vector quantization error is developed. In the error function, if a must-link constraint is violated, the cost then is measured by the distance between the cluster centroids containing the two instances. Similarly, in case a cannot-link constraint is violated, the cost is the distance between the cluster centroid that both instances are in and the nearest cluster centroid to one of the instances. Some improved version of the CVQE can be noted here such as LCVQE [39] and CVQE+ [32]. In [9], another version of constraints K-Means algorithm is presented. Similarly to CVQE, the objective function in that work is designed to integrate a set of constraints in the clus- tering process. It minimize the sum of the distance between every data points to the cluster centroids. The cost of constraint violations and the assignment process will satisfy as many must-links and cannot-links as possible. In [22], a constraint Fuzzy C-Means has been intro- duced, named AFCC. The constraints are embedded in the membership matrix using in an objective function. In AFCC, for a must-link constraints, the penalty corresponding to the presence of two such points in different clusters is weighted by the corresponding membership values; for a cannot-link constraint, the penalty corresponding to the presence of two such points in a same cluster is weighted by their membership values. In [4], the Constraints Ev- idential C-Means (CECM) has been proposed. In CECM, the objective function integrates a penalty term using the given constraints. The conducted experiments on UCI datasets showed the efficient of that proposed algorithm. Metric and hybrid based methods Given a set of constraints, in metric learning method, constraints are used to train a metric such that after training phase, must-link (similar) instances are close together and cannot-link (different) instances are far apart. Some distances have been used such as Jensen-Shannon divergence trained using gradient descent [14], Euclidean distance modified by a shortest-path algorithm [28], Mahalanobis distances trained using convex optimiza- tion (MCO) [7, 54], distance metric learning based on Discriminative Component Analysis (MDCA) [23] and a kernel-based metric learning (KML) method that provides a non-linear transformation for semi-supervised clustering [6]. Declarative methods In these methods, the clustering model can be transformed in an optimization framework using integer linear programming (ILP), SAT, constraint programming or mathematical programming, etc. These approaches can present the different types of user constraints and the search of an exact solution that is a global optimum and satisfies all the user constraints. In [15], a general and declarative framework based on constraint programming for con- strained clustering has been developed, we refer the algorithm as CPCC for short. The
  6. 76 VU-TUAN DANG, et.al framework allows to model different problems of constrained clustering, by integrating sev- eral optimization criteria (diameter, split, within-cluster sum of dissimilarities - WCSD, within-cluster sum of squares - WCSS) and various types of user constraints. In [21], a ILP based method for constraint hierarchical clustering has been proposed, named ILP-HC. In the work, they formalize hierarchical clustering as an integer linear pro- gramming problem with a natural objective function and the dendrogram properties enforced as linear constraints. Formulating the problem as an ILP allows the use of high quality solvers (free and commercial) such as CPLEX and Gurobi (used in all our experiments) to find solutions and automatically take advantage of multi-core architectures. In [18], a two-cluster problem has been introduced. By transforming instance level con- straints (must-link,cannot-link) and cluster-level constraints (maximum-diameter (DS), min- imum separation (MS)) to 2SAT problem, they produce an efficient algorithm for clustering task. The obtained results outperform some other constraint based clustering algorithms. Discussions From the previous works above, it can be said that semi-supervised clustering is one of the most attractive research directions in the data mining and machine learning task in the past two decades. These works have been effective in integrating side information to detect clusters that the users expect. 3. ACTIVE SEMI-SUPERVISED GRAPH BASED CLUSTERING WITH BACKGROUND KNOWLEDGE 3.1. Graph-based Clustering Given a data set X = {x1, x2, . . . , xn}, the idea of using graph for clustering problem is as follows [26, 19]. Firstly, a weighted undirected graph will be used for presenting the data set X where each vertex represents a point of data, and has at most k edges to its nearest neighbors. An edge is constructed between two points xi and xj, if and only if they have each other in their set of k-nearest neighbors. The weight of two vertices xi and xj, called ω(xi, xj), is defined as the number of common nearest neighbors that two vertices share, as in the equation (1) ω(xi, xj) =| NN(xi) ∩ NN(xj) | (1) where NN(.) is the k-nearest neighbors set for a specified point. From the graph defined above, in [26], authors find clusters by partitioning the graph in clusters with a threshold θ. The limitation of this algorithm is that it is not easy to find the threshold θ. In [45], a semi-supervised graph based clustering by seeding has been proposed, named SSGC. The SSGC method uses a set of seeds that overcomes the limit in finding parameters for the partitioning step into sub-clusters. Moreover, the algorithm uses only one parameter k that is the number of nearest neighbors. The SSGC has shown its effectiveness compared to the another semi-supervised density based clustering (SSDBSCAN) [31]. In the following section, we will try to extend the SSGC (Semi-supervised Clustering using Seeds) to work with both seeds and constraints in the same clustering process.
  7. GRAPH BASED CLUSTERING WITH CONSTRAINTS 77 3.2. Semi-supervised graph-based clustering with background knowledge In this subsection, we propose a new semi-supervised graph-based clustering that tries to integrate both constraints and seeds in the process of clustering. We name our algorithm MCSSGC (Semi-Supervised Graph based Clustering with Must-link and Cannot-link con- straints). This is probably the second algorithm that can use both kinds of side information after our previous work [47]. The MCSSGC algorithm is presented in Algorithm 1 and is explained as follows: ˆ Firstly, we use constraints in the construction of k nearest neighbors (k − NN) graph. In general, the weight ω(xi, xj) of the edge between two vertices xi and xj is calculated as the equation (1). If a Cannot-link constraint exists between xi and xj then we will not calculate the weight between xi and xj. Must-link constraints are also used in finding nearest neighbors for each data point. ˆ Secondly, by using a parameter θ initialized by zero, this step aims to partition a graph into some connected components by using threshold θ in a loop: all edges which have weight less than θ will be removed to form connected components at each step. The loop will stop when the following cut condition is satisfied: each connected component has at most one kind of seeds. ˆ Thirdly, we need to further divide connected components that contains cannot-link constraints (violation of cannot-link constraints). For each connected component con- taining cannot-links, we repeat the removing process of edges that are equal to the value of α initialized by the current value of θ until the violation of cannot-link constraints is false - there are no cannot-link constraints existing in the connected components. This is the new point in the version of MCSSGC in the paper. ˆ Finally, the extracted connected components form the principal clusters. In order to construct the final clusters, we use constraints to push sub-clusters or isolated points in clusters. We also note that the MCSSGC needs only one parameter k - the number of nearest neigh- bors. The θ (initialized by 0) (also α) is identified automatically in these loops as mentioned above. Complexity analysis of the proposed method As mentioned in [19], the complexity of the construction of the k −NN graph is O(n2) or O(n×log n) (applied for low dimension data and an optimized structure is used, e.g. R-Tree). Using Best First Search for finding connected components, the complexity of connected components extraction (step 3-6) is O(θ × k × n) where k is the number of neighbors; the complexity of the steps from 7 to 14 is O((αmax − θ) × k × n). In fact, α << n and θ << n, so the complexity of the algorithm MCSSGC is O(n2) or O(n × log n) (if the dimension of data is low). 3.3. Active learning for MCSSGC As mentioned in Section 2, the constraints or seeds must be labeled by users before their use in semi-supervised clustering algorithms. In some applications, getting label is time
  8. 78 VU-TUAN DANG, et.al Algorithm 1 MCSSGC Algorithm Input: Data set X , number of neighbors k, a set of seeds S, a set of constraints C Output: A partitioning of X Process: 1: Integrate the constraints set C in the construction of k − NN graph 2: θ = 0 3: repeat 4: Extract connected components with threshold θ 5: θ = θ + 1 6: until the cut condition is satisfied 7: for all connected components containing at least one Cannot-links do 8: α = θ, αmax = α 9: repeat 10: Delete any edge that its weight is equal to α (applied for connected components containing at least one CL) 11: α = α + 1 12: until violation of cannot-links = false 13: αmax = max{αmax, α} 14: end for 15: Use constraints in propagation process of label to form principal clusters 16: Use constraints set C to construct final clusters consuming so the question here is how we can minimize the effort required from the user, by only soliciting her (him) for the most useful constraints/seeds. There are some active learning algorithms in literature that we can note here such as min-max method [9, 33] applied for constrained K-Means, the border based method applied for semi-supervised fuzzy C-Means [22], the method based on Ability Separate between Clusters measure, we refer as the ASC method [49], the method based on density of data [2], the IPCM method applied for Fuzzy C-Means algorithms. Among these methods, the ASC method has efficiently shown for all constraint-based clustering algorithms. In this section we propose a simple but efficient method to collect the constraints that can boost the performance of the MCSSGC algorithm. Our method bases on the Min-Max Farthest First Query Selection (MMFFQS) method [34] and the K-Means algorithm, so we call the KMMFFQS algorithm. The idea of the Min-Max Approach (MMA) presented is to build a set of points Y from a dataset X such that the points in Y are far from each other and ensures a good coverage of the dataset. The main principles of MMA are described hereafter. First a starting point y1 is randomly chosen from the dataset X. Then, all the other points in Y are chosen among the points of X that maximize their minimal distance from the points already in Y . Thus, when t points already belong to Y , the process that selects the point yt+1 from X can be formalized as shown   yt+1 = arg max min d(x, y) (2) x∈X y∈Y where d(., .) denotes the distance defined in the space of the objects.
  9. GRAPH BASED CLUSTERING WITH CONSTRAINTS 79 Figure 2. An example of constraints collected by the KMMFFQS for the t4.8k.dat and art1.dat data sets: (left) solid lines are expressed candidate queries; (right) solid and dashed lines are expressed for Must- and Cannot-link constraints respectively. The underlying idea of the MMA in the context of active learning, is to select the point that is the farthest from the points that have already been used to formulate a query to the user. In other words, at each iteration, this method selects the point that exhibits the largest label according to the previous answers of the user. Based on the min-max method, in [9, 33], the authors proposed an active learning method to collect constraints, however, the constraints collected by these methods were only adapted for semi-supervised partitioning algorithms such as K-Means, and Fuzzy C-Means. There- fore, in our new algorithm, we try to develop an algorithm that can collect pairwise con- straints and independent from the shape of clusters. In the KMMFFQS, we chose a skeleton points as follows: using K-Means algorithm to divide the given data set in to U partitions (U is chosen large enough), in each partition, we chose a point nearest the center of the partition; from that we have U points forming a skeleton. From the skeleton, we apply the min-max method to chose points for generating the candidate constraint queries. Algorithm 2 KMMFFQS Algorithm Input: Data set X , U Output: A set of collected constraints Process: 1: Using K-Means to divide X in to U partitions 2: Constructing the skeleton 3: Applying the Min-Max method to collect constraints from users Figure 2 shows some examples of the KMMFFQS algorithm for collecting constraints.
  10. 80 VU-TUAN DANG, et.al 4. EXPERIMENT RESULTS 4.1. Datasets We use some well-known data sets from the Machine Learning Repository [5], and a document data set to evaluate our algorithm. The characteristics of these data sets are presented in Table 2. Notice that these data sets have been chosen because they have already been used in semi-supervised clustering articles [10, 25, 31, 55]. Table 2. Details of the data sets used in experiments ID Data #Objects #Attributes #Clusters 1 Ecoli 336 7 8 2 Iris 150 4 3 3 Protein 115 20 6 4 Soybean 47 35 4 5 Zoo 101 16 7 6 Haberman 306 3 2 7 Yeast 1484 8 10 8 D1 4000 30 10 4.2. Evaluation method We use the rand index (RI) measure [40] to evaluate the clustering results. It is one of the most widely measures used for clustering evaluation. It measures the agreement between the true partition (P1) of a data set and a generated partition (P2) by a clustering algorithm. Given a data set X = x1, x2, . . . , xn, and two partitions P1 and P2 as mentioned above, let a the total number of pairs of points located in the same cluster in P1 and P2 and let b be the total number of pairs of points such that the two points are placed in different clusters in both partitions. The RI is calculated as follows 2(a + b) RI(P ,P ) = . (3) 1 2 n(n − 1) The value of RI is in the interval [0, 1], in our experiments, we calculate the RI in percentage. A higher RI value indicates a better performance of the clustering algorithm. 4.3. Comparative results To show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, we compare MCSSGC with MCSS- DBS and SSGC. These algorithms are the recent works in semi-supervised clustering topic. The seeds for all semi-supervised methods are randomly generated for each experiment. Sim- ilarly, the Must-link (ML) and Cannot link (CL) sets are also randomly chosen from the data sets. The results are averaged over 20 runs. The quality of clustering
  11. GRAPH BASED CLUSTERING WITH CONSTRAINTS 81 Figure 3 shows the RI varying with the number of constraints obtained by these algo- rithms. A glance at the graphs reveals in most cases the MCSSGC obtained comparable and better results with MCSSDBS - the semi-supervised clustering using both seeds and constraints. When comparing with SSGC, MCSSGC significantly improves the results, indi- cating the benefit of using both seeds and constraints to build the clusters in the proposed algorithm. Notice that all the results in the experiments are calculated on the unlabeled data set, not including the data points (seeds) for which labels were provided to the clustering algorithm. For more details, the improvement of MCSSGC is pronounced more in Ecoli, Soybean and Haberman data sets, that gives them three biggest improvements over MCSSDBS and SSGC. Especially for Haberman, the performance of MCSSGC significantly improves (about 10%) compared with MCSSDBS and SSGC. Another observation can be noted is the result on Ecoli. Ecoli is a 7-dimensional data set consisting of 336 objects belonging to 8 clusters and these clusters are highly overlap. Moreover, this is also an unbalanced data set. The details of Ecoli cluster distribution is shown in Table 3. The performance obtained 94.1% when using 90 seeds and 500 constraints. Similarly, the Yeast dataset is another challenging dataset for classification/clustering tasks since it is a highly unbalance data set, and the size of clusters are very different, as shown in Table 4. However, our new algorithm can produce good results as the MCSSDBS does. The use of constraints in this case has also been proved to be useful. They can significantly help the partitioning process to obtain the principal clusters (small clusters). In the Haberman dataset, which is unbalanced and has highly overlapped clusters - Figure 2, if we only use seeds, it is very difficult to boost the performance of clustering process, however, the result obtained by MCSSGC is significantly boosted by further using constraints. This can be explained by the fact that when dealing with overlapping clusters, the use of constraints will efficiently help the algorithm separate points between clusters. Table 3. Ecoli class distribution #Class #Objects cp(cytoplasm) 143 im(inner membrane without signal sequence) 77 pp(perisplasm) 52 imU(inner membrane, uncleavable signal sequence) 35 om(outer membrane) 20 omL(outer membrane lipoprotein) 5 imL(inner membrane lipoprotein) 2 imS(inner membrane, cleavable signal sequence 2 Contribution of Must-Link and Cannot-Link Constraints in MCSSGC To answer the question which Must-Link or Cannot-Link constraints are more beneficial in MCSSGC clustering process, we test the MCSSGC using only must-link constraints to compare with the MCSSGC results obtained using both Must- and Cannot-link constraints. These results are illustrated in Figure 5.
  12. 82 VU-TUAN DANG, et.al 100 100 95 95 90 85 90 80 MCSSGC Rand Index MCSSGC Rand Index 85 75 MCSSDBS MCSSDBS SSGC SSGC 70 80 30/300 60/400 90/500 120/600 35/150 45/200 55/250 65/300 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Ecoli Iris 90 100 80 95 70 90 MCSSGC Rand Index 60 Rand Index 85 MCSSGC MCSSDBS MCSSDBS SSGC SSGC 50 80 18/60 20/80 22/100 25/120 11/30 12/50 13/80 14/90 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Protein Soybean 90 100 80 95 70 90 Rand Index 60 MCSSGC Rand Index 85 MCSSGC MCSSDBS MCSSDBS SSGC SSGC 50 80 300/1000 400/2000 500/3000 600/4000 20/120 22/140 24/160 26/180 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Yeast Zoo 80 100 70 90 60 80 50 70 Rand Index MCSSGC Rand Index MCSSGC 40 MCSSDBS 60 MCSSDBS SSGC SSGC 30 50 10/800 20/900 30/1000 40/1100 20/30 50/50 80/70 110/100 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Haberman D1 Figure 3. Comparison results between MCSSGC (the version in Algorithm 1), MCSSDBS, and SSGC.
  13. GRAPH BASED CLUSTERING WITH CONSTRAINTS 83 60 40 20 0 −20 80 75 100 70 80 65 60 60 40 Figure 4. Haberman data set visualization Experimental results in these figures depict that MCSSGC with only Must-Link con- straints outperforms in all experiments. Remarkably, the performance on Protein data set reached 86.5% clustering accuracy, an improvement of nearly 6% compared to MCSSGC (ML+CL); for the difficult clustering data set like Ecoli, the accuracy is 97%. Moreover, we can see that the more number of must-link constraints we have, the more benefits of accuracy we obtain. These results have shown the important contribution of must-link constraints in MCSSGC, especially, when the clusters are overlap, e.g. in Haberman, the use of Must-link can significantly help the algorithm to separate those clusters. 4.4. KMMFFQS experiments This section presents the results of clustering obtained by using constraints generated by the KMMFFQS, the ASC method, and the Random methods. The Rand Index plotted against the constraints for 8 data sets is shown in the Figure 2. As it can be observed, the constraints collected by the KMMFFQS are generally more beneficial for MCSSGC than those provided by the ASC approach and Random method. It can be explained by the fact that (1) when we partition a data set to a large number of clusters, the process of collecting constraints does not depend on the shape of clusters and (2) by using the min-max method, we can always find the good candidate to get label from users/experts. One more advantage of the KMMFFQS compared with the ASC method is that the KMMFFQS needs only one parameter U that is the number of partitions for K-Means at first step and this value can be √ √ easily chosen. In this experiments, the value of U is chosen in the interval of [ n − 3, n] [58].
  14. 84 VU-TUAN DANG, et.al 100 100 95 95 90 85 90 80 Rand Index Rand Index 85 75 MCSSGC (ML only) MCSSGC (ML only) MCSSGC (ML + CL) MCSSGC (ML + CL) 70 80 30/300 60/400 90/500 120/600 35/150 45/200 55/250 65/300 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Ecoli Iris 100 100 90 95 80 90 Rand Index 70 Rand Index 85 MCSSGC (ML only) MCSSGC (ML only) MCSSGC (ML + CL) MCSSGC (ML + CL) 60 80 18/60 20/80 22/100 25/120 30/300 60/400 90/500 120/600 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Protein Soybean 90 100 85 95 80 90 75 85 70 80 Rand Index Rand Index 65 MCSSGC (ML only) 75 MCSSGC (ML only) MCSSGC (ML + CL) MCSSGC (ML + CL) 60 70 300/1000 400/2000 500/3000 600/4000 20/120 22/140 24/160 26/180 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Yeast Zoo 90 90 80 85 70 80 60 Rand Index Rand Index 75 50 MCSSGC (ML only) MCSSGC (ML only) MCSSGC (ML + CL) MCSSGC (ML + CL) 40 70 10/800 20/900 30/1000 40/1100 20/30 50/50 80/70 110/100 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Haberman D1 Table 5. Comparison results between MCSSGC + Must-Link constraints only and MCSSGC + Must-Link and Cannot-link constraints combined.
  15. GRAPH BASED CLUSTERING WITH CONSTRAINTS 85 100 100 95 90 90 80 85 Rand Index Rand Index 80 KMMFFQS KMMFFQS 70 ASC 75 ASC Random Random 60 70 30/300 30/400 30/500 30/600 6/30 6/40 6/50 6/60 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Ecoli Iris 100 100 90 95 90 80 85 70 Rand Index Rand Index 80 KMMFFQS KMMFFQS 60 ASC 75 ASC Random Random 50 70 25/60 25/80 25/100 25/120 6/2 6/6 6/10 6/20 6/30 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Protein Soybean 100 75 90 70 80 65 70 60 Rand Index Rand Index KMMFFQS KMMFFQS 60 ASC 55 ASC Random Random 50 50 100/200 100/400 100/600 100/800 25/100 25/120 25/140 25/160 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Yeast Zoo 70 100 65 90 60 80 55 70 Rand Index 50 Rand Index KMMFFQS KMMFFQS 45 ASC 60 ASC Random Random 40 50 25/100 25/200 25/300 25/400 20/30 20/50 20/70 20/90 Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Number of seeds/Number of Pairwise Constraints Haberman D1 Figure 6. Clustering results by MCSSGC using constraints generated by the KMMFFQS, ASC, and Random methods.
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