Constrained spectral clustering via exhaustive and efficient constraint propagation

This paper presents an exhaustive and efficient constraint propagation approach to exploiting pairwise constraints for spectral clustering. Since traditional label propagation techniques cannot be readily generalized to propagate pairwise constraints, we tackle the constraint propagation problem inversely by decomposing it to a set of independent label propagation subproblems which are further solved in quadratic time using semi-supervised learning based on k-nearest neighbors graphs. Since this time complexity is proportional to the number of all possible pairwise constraints, our approach gives a computationally efficient solution for exhaustively propagating pairwise constraint throughout the entire dataset. The resulting exhaustive set of propagated pairwise constraints are then used to adjust the weight (or similarity) matrix for spectral clustering. It is worth noting that this paper first clearly shows how pairwise constraints are propagated independently and then accumulated into a conciliatory closed-form solution. Experimental results on real-life datasets demonstrate that our approach to constrained spectral clustering outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.