  In correlation clustering, we are given $n$ objects together with a binary
similarity score between each pair of them. The goal is to partition the
objects into clusters so to minimise the disagreements with the scores. In this
work we investigate correlation clustering as an active learning problem: each
similarity score can be learned by making a query, and the goal is to minimise
both the disagreements and the total number of queries. On the one hand, we
describe simple active learning algorithms, which provably achieve an almost
optimal trade-off while giving cluster recovery guarantees, and we test them on
different datasets. On the other hand, we prove information-theoretical bounds
on the number of queries necessary to guarantee a prescribed disagreement
bound. These results give a rich characterization of the trade-off between
queries and clustering error.
