Post date: May 13, 2014 6:24:47 PM
A paper by Lubomír Tichý,Milan Chytrý and Zoltán Botta-Dukát recently published in Journal of Vegetation Science introduces the concept of semi-supervised classification to community ecology and vegetation science. Semi-supervised classification formally reproduces the existing units in a supervised mode and simultaneously identifies new units among unassigned sites in an unsupervised mode. In this paper, Tichy et al. discuss the concept of semi-supervised clustering, introduce semi-supervised variants of two clustering algorithms that produce groups with crisp boundaries, k-means and partitioning around medoids (PAM), provide a free software tool to perform these classifications and demonstrate the advantages using example data sets of vegetation plots.
Tichý et al. (2014). Semi-supervised classification of vegetation: preserving the good old units and searching for new ones. Journal of Vegetation Science (early view):
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jvs.12193/abstract