K-means with Large and Noisy Constraint Sets

We focus on the problem of clustering with soft instance-level constraints. Recently, the CVQE algorithm was proposed in this context. It modifies the objective function of traditional K-means to include penalties for violated constraints. CVQE was shown to efficiently produce high-quality clustering of UCI data. In this work, we examine the properties of CVQE and propose a modification that results in a more intuitive objective function, with lower computational complexity. We present our extensive experimentation, which provides insight into CVQE and shows that our new variant can dramatically improve clustering quality while reducing run time. We show its superiority in a large-scale surveillance scenario with noisy constraints.

By: Dan Pelleg, Dorit Baras

Published in: H-0253 in 2007

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