What is Semi-supervised clustering

Semi-supervised Clustering: An Overview

Introduction

Semi-supervised clustering is a type of clustering that incorporates labeled and unlabeled data to improve the clustering accuracy. It is a popular approach in machine learning, particularly in those cases where the cost of labeling the data is too high for all the data.

Clustering or unsupervised learning is a process of dividing data into groups or clusters without prior knowledge of the group labels. In other words, the task is to group similar entities together and dissimilar entities apart. The most common approach to clustering is the K-means algorithm, which partitions the data into K clusters based on minimizing the sum of the squared distances between the data points and their cluster centroids.

In this article, we will discuss the concept of semi-supervised clustering in more detail.

The Need for Semi-supervised Clustering

Clustering algorithms use distance measures to determine the similarity between data points, which can be calculated using various metrics, such as Euclidean distance or cosine similarity. These metrics work well when the data is well-separated and has distinct clusters. However, in real-world scenarios, the data can often be complex and overlap, making it difficult for the clustering algorithm to identify the clusters accurately.

Moreover, clustering algorithms require a pre-defined number of clusters to produce viable results. It may not always be feasible to determine the optimal number of clusters, especially when the data is high-dimensional and complex.

Semi-supervised clustering serves as a solution to these problems by incorporating labeled data to guide the clustering process. The labeled data provides a set of constraints or prior information that guides the clustering algorithm to produce more accurate results.

The Types of Semi-supervised Clustering

Semi-supervised clustering can be broadly classified into two categories, namely:

Semi-supervised partitioning;
Semi-supervised hierarchical.

Semi-supervised Partitioning

Semi-supervised partitioning aims to partition the data into K clusters, where K is known a priori. The algorithm uses a set of pairwise constraints that indicate which data points should or should not belong to the same cluster.

The most popular approach to semi-supervised partitioning is the constrained K-means algorithm, which extends the conventional K-means algorithm to incorporate pairwise constraints. The constraints can be of two types:

Must-link constraints: Indicates that two data points must belong to the same cluster.
Cannot-link constraints: Indicates that two data points cannot belong to the same cluster.

The constrained K-means algorithm works by initializing the cluster centers using the K-means algorithm with unlabeled data. The algorithm then iteratively optimizes the cluster centers by taking into account the constraints.

The objective function of the constrained K-means algorithm can be defined as follows:

$\text{minimize} \sum_{x_i\in C_j} \left\|x_i - \mu_j\right\|^2 + \lambda \sum_{(x_i, x_k) \in constraints} d_{ik}$

Here, the first term is the squared error objective function of the K-means algorithm, while the second term is the constraint function that restricts the distance between the data points based on the pairwise constraints. $\lambda$ is the weight parameter that controls the balance between the two objective functions.

Semi-supervised Hierarchical

Semi-supervised hierarchical clustering aims to construct a hierarchical structure of clusters from the data. The algorithm uses a set of pairwise constraints to guide the merges and splits of clusters at each level of the hierarchy.

The most popular approach to semi-supervised hierarchical clustering is the constrained agglomerative hierarchical clustering (CAHC) algorithm. CAHC starts by considering each data point as a singleton cluster and then iteratively merges the closest clusters based on the constraints. The algorithm stops when the number of clusters reaches the desired level of granularity or when all the constraints are satisfied.

The objective function of the CAHC algorithm can be defined as follows:

$\text{minimize} \sum_{c_i, c_j}\sum_{(x, y) \in merge(c_i, c_j)} d_{xy} - \lambda \sum_{(c_i, c_j) \in constraints} d_{ij}$

Here, the objective function consists of two terms. The first term is the sum of the distances between all the data points that are merged in each step, while the second term is the sum of the distances between the clusters that should not be merged based on the pairwise constraints. $\lambda$ is the weight parameter that controls the balance between the two objective functions.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Semi-supervised Clustering

Semi-supervised clustering offers several advantages over traditional unsupervised clustering, including:

Improved clustering accuracy: Incorporating labeled data can improve the clustering accuracy by guiding the clustering algorithm to produce more accurate results.
Reduced labeling costs: Semi-supervised clustering allows for the use of fewer labeled data points, reducing the cost of labeling the data.
Robustness to noisy data: Semi-supervised clustering can be robust to noisy data, as it can use the pairwise constraints to filter out noise in the data.

However, semi-supervised clustering also has some disadvantages, including:

Dependence on the quality of labeled data: The quality of the clustering results depends on the quality of the labeled data. Poor-quality labeled data can lead to inaccurate clustering results.
Sensitivity to the pairwise constraints: The choice of pairwise constraints can significantly impact the clustering results. Choosing the wrong constraints can lead to incorrect results.
Computational complexity: Semi-supervised clustering algorithms are generally more computationally complex than unsupervised clustering algorithms, as they require the optimization of additional objectives function.

Conclusion

Semi-supervised clustering is a useful approach in machine learning, particularly in those cases where the cost of labeling the data is too high for all the data. It has been successfully applied in various domains, such as image segmentation, document clustering, and gene expression analysis.

Semi-supervised clustering can provide more accurate and robust clustering results than traditional unsupervised clustering methods, but it depends on the availability and quality of labeled data. Moreover, semi-supervised clustering algorithms can be computationally expensive.

In future, it may be possible to improve the quality of semi-supervised clustering results by developing more robust pairwise constraints and developing more efficient algorithms for optimizing the objective function.