Novel Dual-Constraint-Based Semi-Supervised Deep Clustering Approach
Mona Suliman AlZuhair, Mohamed Maher Ben Ismail, Ouiem Bchir · Sensors · 2025
Semi-supervised clustering can be viewed as a clustering paradigm that exploits both labeled and unlabeled data to steer learning accurate data clusters and avoid local minimum solutions. Nonetheless, the attempts to refine existing semi-supervised clustering methods are relatively limited when compared to the advancements witnessed in the current benchmark methods in fully unsupervised clustering. This research introduces a novel semi-supervised method for deep clustering that leverages deep neural networks and fuzzy memberships to better capture the data partitions. In particular, the proposed Dual-Constraint-based Semi-Supervised Deep Clustering (DC-SSDEC) method utilizes two sets of pairwise soft constraints; "should-link" and "shouldNot-link", to guide the clustering process. The intended clustering task is expressed as an optimization of a newly designed objective function. Additionally, DC-SSDEC performance was evaluated through comprehensive experiments using three real-world and benchmark datasets. Moreover, a comparison with related state-of-the-art clustering techniques was conducted to showcase the DC-SSDEC outperformance. In particular, DC-SSDEC significance consists of the proposed dual-constraint formulation and its integration into a novel objective function. This contribution yielded an improvement in the resulting clustering performance compared to relevant state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, the assessment of the proposed model using real-world datasets represents another contribution of this research. In fact, increases of 3.25%, 1.44%, and 1.82% in the clustering accuracy were gained by DC-SSDEC over the best performing single-constraint-based approach, using MNIST, STL-10, and USPS datasets, respectively.