Abstract: Techniques are provided for incorporating human or user interaction in accordance with the design and/or performance of data mining applications such as similarity determination and classification. Such user-centered techniques permit the mining of interesting characteristics of data in a data or feature space. For example, such interesting characteristics that may be determined in accordance with the user-centered mining techniques of the invention may include a determination of similarity among different data objects, as well the determination of individual class labels. These techniques allow effective data mining applications to be performed in accordance with high dimensional data.