A survey on Optimisation-based Semi-supervised Clustering Methods

Clustering methods are developed for categorizing data points into different groups so that data points within each group have high similarities. Classic clustering algorithms are unsupervised, meaning that there is not any kind of complementary information to be utilized for attaining better clustering results. However, in some clustering problems, one may have supplementary information which can be employed for guiding the clustering process. In the presence of such information, the problem is semi-supervised clustering. In some articles, the problem of semi-supervised clustering is modeled as an optimization problem. In this research, optimization-based semi-supervised clustering papers from 2013 to 2020 are reviewed. This review is conducted based on a four-step procedure. It is attempted to explore objective functions and optimization algorithms used in these articles, as well as application domain and types of supervised information.