A deductive clustering approach

Clustering is concerned with grouping a collection of input objects. Conventional clustering algorithms cluster unlabelled objects. We argue that there are useful applications that involve clustering of labelled objects. We propose an approach for clustering of labelled objects. The proposed approach makes use of the domain knowledge represented in the form of a directed acyclic graph for clustering. We also propose a set of proper axioms in logic as a basis for the proposed algorithm. We study some of the properties of the approach such as order-independence and describe in detail an application of the proposed algorithm in the context of document retrieval (62 refs.