FA-Seed: Flexible and Active Learning-Based Seed Selection

This paper addresses the fundamental problem of seed selection in semi-supervised clustering, where the quality of initial seeds has a significant impact on clustering performance and stability. Existing methods often rely on randomly or heuristically selected seeds, which can propagate errors and increase dependence on expert labeling. To overcome these limitations, we propose FA-Seed, a flexible and adaptive model that integrates active querying with self-guided adaptation within the framework of fuzzy hyperboxes. FA-Seed partitions the data into hyperboxes, evaluates seed reliability through measures of membership and association density, and propagates labels with an emphasis on label purity. The model demonstrates strong adaptability to complex and ambiguous data distributions in which cluster boundaries are vague or overlapping. The main contributions of FA-Seed include: (1) automatic estimation and selection of candidate seeds that provide auxiliary supervision, (2) dynamic cluster expansion without retraining, (3) automatic detection and identification of structurally complex regions based on cluster characteristics, and (4) the ability to capture intrinsic cluster structures even when clusters vary in density and shape. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets, specifically the UCI and Computer Science collections, show that our approach consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art semi-supervised clustering methods.