Clustering With Side Information: From a Probabilistic Model to a Deterministic Algorithm

In this paper, we propose a model-based clustering method (TVClust) that robustly incorporates noisy side information as soft-constraints and aims to seek a consensus between side information and the observed data. Our method is based on a nonparametric Bayesian hierarchical model that combines the probabilistic model for the data instance and the one for the side-information. An efficient Gibbs sampling algorithm is proposed for posterior inference. Using the small-variance asymptotics of our probabilistic model, we then derive a new deterministic clustering algorithm (RDP-means). It can be viewed as an extension of K-means that allows for the inclusion of side information and has the additional property that the number of clusters does not need to be specified a priori. Empirical studies have been carried out to compare our work with many constrained clustering algorithms from the literature on both a variety of data sets and under a variety of conditions such as using noisy side information and erroneous k values. The results of our experiments show strong results for our probabilistic and deterministic approaches under these conditions when compared to other algorithms in the literature.