Comparing and Unifying Search-Based and Similarity-Based Approaches to Semi-Supervised Clustering

Semi-supervised clustering employs a small amount of labeled data to aid unsupervised learning. Previous work in the area has employed one of two approaches: 1) Searchbased methods that utilize supervised data to guide the search for the best clustering, and 2) Similarity-based methods that use supervised data to adapt the underlying similarity metric used by the clustering algorithm. This paper presents a unifled approach based on the K-Means clustering algorithm that incorporates both of these techniques. Experimental results demonstrate that the combined approach generally produces better clusters than either of the individual approaches.