Towards effective document clustering:: A constrained K-means based approach

Document clustering is an important tool for document collection organization and browsing. In real applications, some limited knowledge about cluster membership of a small number of documents is often available, such as some pairs of documents belonging to the same cluster. This kind of prior knowledge can be served as constraints for the clustering process. We integrate the constraints into the trace formulation of the sum of square Euclidean distance function of K-means. Then,the combined criterion function is transformed into trace maximization, which is further optimized by eigen-decomposition. Our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed semi-supervised clustering method can achieve better performance, compared to three existing methods. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.