A semi-supervised hierarchical ensemble clustering framework based on a novel similarity metric and stratified feature sampling

Recently, both ensemble clustering and semi-supervised clustering have emerged as important paradigms of traditional clustering. Ensemble clustering seeks to integrate multiple clustering results from different methods or the same methods with different parameters. Semi-supervised clustering involves using a small amount of class membership information in some samples for the learning process. Meanwhile, Semi-Supervised Ensemble Clustering (SSEC) has attracted increasing attention due to its high performance. However, most SSEC algorithms are configured based on partitional clustering techniques, and there are few attempts on hierarchical clustering techniques. Even in existing hierarchybased SSEC algorithms, prior knowledge is not sufficiently used and is often applied to create primary partitions. To address these problems, we propose a Semi-supervised Hierarchical Ensemble Clustering framework based on a novel Similarity metric and stratified feature Sampling, which we call SHECSS. SHECSS uses the information of all primary partitions according to their strength to calculate the similarity between samples. Also, SHECSS is equipped with a stratified feature sampling mechanism that can improve the diversity of primary partitions and deal with high-dimensional data. Here, the primary partitions are created based on multiple hierarchical clustering techniques, and the target partition is configured by a consensus function based on the clusters clustering policy. Experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of SHECSS compared to representative clustering methods.(c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).