An experimental study of constrained clustering effectiveness in presence of erroneous constraints

Recently a new fashion of semi-supervised clustering algorithms, coined as constrained clustering, has emerged. These new algorithms can incorporate some a priori domain knowledge to the clustering process, allowing the user to guide the method. The vast majority of studies about the effectiveness of these approaches have been performed using information, in the form of constraints, which was totally accurate. This would be the ideal case, but such a situation will be impossible in most realistic settings, due to errors in the constraint creation process, misjudgements of the user, inconsistent information, etc. Hence, the robustness of the constrained clustering algorithms when dealing with erroneous constraints is bound to play an important role in their final effectiveness.