Semi-Supervised Affinity Propagation with Soft Instance-Level Constraints
Soft-Constraint Semi-Supervised Affinity Propagation (SCSSAP) adds supervision to the affinity propagation (AP) clustering algorithm without strictly enforcing instance-level constraints. Constraint violations lead to an adjustment of the AP similarity matrix at every iteration of the proposed algorithm and to addition of a penalty to the objective function. This formulation is particularly advantageous in the presence of noisy labels or noisy constraints since the penalty parameter of SCSSAP can be tuned to express our confidence in instance-level constraints.