Creating a Cluster Hierarchy under Constraints of a Partially Known Hierarchy

Although clustering under constraints is a current research topic, a hierarchical setting, in which a hierarchy of clusters is the goal, is usually not considered. This paper tries to fill this gap by analyzing a scenario, where constraints are derived from a hierarchy that is partially known in advance. This scenario can be found, e.g., when structuring a collection of documents according to a user specific hierarchy. Major issues of current approaches to constraint based clustering are discussed, especially towards the hierarchical setting. We introduce the concept of hierarchical constraints and continue by presenting and evaluating two approaches using them. The approaches cover the two major fields of constraint based clustering, i.e. instance and metric based constraint integration. Our objects of interest are text documents. Therefore, the presented algorithms are especially fitted to work for these where necessary. Despite showing the properties and ideas of the algorithms in general, we evaluated the case of constraints that are unevenly scattered over the instance space, which is very common for real-world problems but not satisfyingly covered in other work so far.