Semi-supervised graph clustering: a kernel approach

  • Authors:
  • Brian Kulis;Sugato Basu;Inderjit Dhillon;Raymond Mooney

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

  • Venue:
  • ICML '05 Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Machine learning
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Semi-supervised clustering algorithms aim to improve clustering results using limited supervision. The supervision is generally given as pairwise constraints; such constraints are natural for graphs, yet most semi-supervised clustering algorithms are designed for data represented as vectors. In this paper, we unify vector-based and graph-based approaches. We show that a recently-proposed objective function for semi-supervised clustering based on Hidden Markov Random Fields, with squared Euclidean distance and a certain class of constraint penalty functions, can be expressed as a special case of the weighted kernel k-means objective. A recent theoretical connection between kernel k-means and several graph clustering objectives enables us to perform semi-supervised clustering of data given either as vectors or as a graph. For vector data, the kernel approach also enables us to find clusters with non-linear boundaries in the input data space. Furthermore, we show that recent work on spectral learning (Kamvar et al., 2003) may be viewed as a special case of our formulation. We empirically show that our algorithm is able to outperform current state-of-the-art semi-supervised algorithms on both vector-based and graph-based data sets.