One of the main challenges in data clustering is to define an appropriate similarity measure between two objects. Crowdclustering addresses this challenge by defining the pairwise similarity based on the manual annotations obtained through crowdsourcing. Despite its encouraging results, a key limitation of crowdclustering is that it can only cluster objects when their manual annotations are available. To address this limitation, we propose a new approach for clustering, called \textit{semi-crowdsourced clustering} that effectively combines the low-level features of objects with the manual annotations of a subset of the objects obtained via crowdsourcing. The key idea is to learn an appropriate similarity measure, based on the low-level features of objects, from the manual annotations of only a small portion of the data to be clustered.

One of the main challenges in data clustering is to define an appropriate similarity measure between two objects. Crowdclustering addresses this challenge by defining the pairwise similarity based on the manual annotations obtained through crowdsourcing. Despite its encouraging results, a key limitation of crowdclustering is that it can only cluster objects when their manual annotations are available. To address this limitation, we propose a new approach for clustering, called \textit{semi-crowdsourced clustering} that effectively combines the low-level features of objects with the manual annotations of a subset of the objects obtained via crowdsourcing. The key idea is to learn an appropriate similarity measure, based on the low-level features of objects, from the manual annotations of only a small portion of the data to be clustered.

Many distance learning algorithms have been developed in recent years. However, few of them consider the problem when the class labels of training data are noisy, and this may lead to serious performance deterioration. In this paper, we present a robust distance learning method in the presence of label noise, by extending a previous non-parametric discriminative distance learning algorithm, i.e., Neighbourhood Components Analysis (NCA). Particularly, we analyze the effect of label noise on the derivative of likelihood with respect to the transformation matrix, and propose to model the conditional probability of the true label of each point so as to reduce that effect. The model is then optimized within the EM framework, with additional regularization used to avoid overfitting. Our experiments on several UCI datasets and a real dataset with unknown noise patterns show that the proposed RNCA is more tolerant to class label noise compared to the original NCA method.