Clustering from Multiple Uncertain Experts

Utilizing expert input often improves clustering performance. However in a knowledge discovery problem, ground truth is unknown even to an expert. Thus, instead of one expert, we solicit the opinion from multiple experts. The key question motivating this work is: which experts should be assigned higher weights when there is disagreement on whether to put a pair of samples in the same group? To model the uncertainty in constraints from different experts, we build a probabilistic model for pairwise constraints through jointly modeling each expert’s accuracy and the mapping from features to latent cluster assignments. After learning our probabilistic discriminative clustering model and accuracies of different experts, 1) samples that were not annotated by any expert can be clustered using the discriminative clustering model; and 2) experts with higher accuracies are automatically assigned higher weights in determining the latent cluster assignments. Experimental results on UCI benchmark datasets and a real-world disease subtyping dataset demonstrate that our proposed approach outperforms competing alternatives, including semi-crowdsourced clustering, semi-supervised clustering with constraints from majority voting, and consensus clustering.