Affinity and Penalty Jointly Constrained Spectral Clustering With All-Compatibility, Flexibility, and Robustness

The existing, semisupervised, spectral clustering approaches have two major drawbacks, i.e., either they cannot cope with multiple categories of supervision or they sometimes exhibit unstable effectiveness. To address these issues, two normalized affinity and penalty jointly constrained spectral clustering frameworks as well as their corresponding algorithms, referred to as type-I affinity and penalty jointly constrained spectral clustering (TI-APJCSC) and type-II affinity and penalty jointly constrained spectral clustering (TII-APJCSC), respectively, are proposed in this paper. TI refers to type-I and TII to type-II. The significance of this paper is fourfold. First, benefiting from the distinctive affinity and penalty jointly constrained strategies, both TI-APJCSC and TII-APJCSC are substantially more effective than the existing methods. Second, both TI-APJCSC and TII-APJCSC are fully compatible with the three well-known categories of supervision, i.e., class labels, pairwise constraints, and grouping information. Third, owing to the delicate framework normalization, both TI-APJCSC and TII-APJCSC are quite flexible. With a simple tradeoff factor varying in the small fixed interval (0, 1), they can self-adapt to any semisupervised scenario. Finally, both TI-APJCSC and TII-APJCSC demonstrate strong robustness, not only to the number of pairwise constraints but also to the parameter for affinity measurement. As such, the novel TI-APJCSC and TII-APJCSC algorithms are very practical for medium- and small-scale semisupervised data sets. The experimental studies thoroughly evaluated and demonstrated these advantages on both synthetic and real-life semisupervised data sets.