We present a new algorithm for spectral clustering based on a column-pivoted QR factorization that may be directly used for cluster assignment or to provide an initial guess for k-means. Our algorithm is simple to implement, direct, and requires no initial guess. Furthermore, it scales linearly in the number of nodes of the graph and a randomized variant provides significant computational gains. Provided the subspace spanned by the eigenvectors used for clustering contains a basis that resembles the set of indicator vectors on the clusters, we prove that both our deterministic and randomized algorithms recover a basis close to the indicators in Frobenius norm. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate that the performance of our algorithm tracks recent information theoretic bounds for exact recovery in the stochastic block model.
Spectral methods as we discuss here stem from work on the Fiedler vector @cite_18 @cite_25 for the two-block case and spectral embeddings coupled with k-means clustering @cite_13 in the multi-block case. For a more comprehensive overview of initialization procedures for k-means see, , @cite_22 . Recent analysis of these methods applied to the SBM @cite_32 @cite_30 focuses on misclassification of nodes. Another line of work considers matrices besides the adjacency matrix or normalized Laplacian to achieve theoretical detection thresholds @cite_15 @cite_33 . Other recent work @cite_0 demonstrates where spectral methods break down and argues for the use of SDP-based methods.
@cite_30 @cite_18 @cite_22 @cite_33 @cite_32 @cite_0 @cite_15 @cite_13 @cite_25
2101866190 2256361316 2131828344 2127475907 1989773214 2964029874 1982666353 2134370969 2262666886
Spectral clustering is a popular and successful approach for partitioning the nodes of a graph into clusters for which the ratio of outside connections compared to the volume (sum of degrees) is small. In order to partition into k clusters, one first computes an approximation of the bottom k eigenvectors of the (normalized) Laplacian of G, uses it to embed the vertices of G into k-dimensional Euclidean space R^k, and then partitions the resulting points via a k-means clustering algorithm. It is an important task for theory to explain the success of spectral clustering. (COLT, 2015) made an important step in this direction. They showed that spectral clustering provably works if the gap between the (k+1)-th and the k-th eigenvalue of the normalized Laplacian is sufficiently large. They proved a structural and an algorithmic result. The algorithmic result needs a considerably stronger gap assumption and does not analyze the standard spectral clustering paradigm; it replaces spectral embedding by heat kernel embedding and k-means clustering by locality sensitive hashing. We extend their work in two directions. Structurally, we improve the quality guarantee for spectral clustering by a factor of k and simultaneously weaken the gap assumption. Algorithmically, we show that the standard paradigm for spectral clustering works. Moreover, it even works with the same gap assumption as required for the structural result. Based on spectral graph theory, spectral clustering is an optimal graph partition problem. It has been proven that the spectral clustering is equivalent to nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) under certain conditions. Based on the equivalence, some spectral clustering methods are proposed, but the global discriminative information of the dataset is neglected. In this paper, based on the equivalence between spectral clustering and NMF, we simultaneously maximize the between-class scatter matrix and minimize the within-class scatter matrix to enhance the discriminating power. We integrate the geometrical structure and discriminative structure in a joint framework. With a global discriminative regularization term added into the nonnegative matrix factorization framework, we propose two novel spectral clustering methods, named global discriminative-based nonnegative and spectral clustering (GDBNSC-Ncut and GDBNSC-Rcut) These new spectral clustering algorithms can preserve both the global geometrical structure and global discriminative structure. The intrinsic geometrical information of the dataset is detected, and clustering quality is improved with enhanced discriminating power. In addition, the proposed algorithms also have very good abilities of handling out-of-sample data. Experimental results on real word data demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform some state-of-the-art methods with good clustering qualities. We maximize the between-class scatter matrix.Meanwhile, we minimize the within-class scatter matrix.We integrate the geometrical structure and discriminative structure in a framework.A global discriminative regularization term added into the objective functions.The new algorithms can preserve the global geometrical and discriminative structure. Spectral clustering (SC) methods have been successfully applied to many real-world applications. The success of these SC methods is largely based on the manifold assumption, namely, that two nearby data points in the high-density region of a low-dimensional data manifold have the same cluster label. However, such an assumption might not always hold on high-dimensional data. When the data do not exhibit a clear low-dimensional manifold structure (e.g., high-dimensional and sparse data), the clustering performance of SC will be degraded and become even worse than K -means clustering. In this paper, motivated by the observation that the true cluster assignment matrix for high-dimensional data can be always embedded in a linear space spanned by the data, we propose the spectral embedded clustering (SEC) framework, in which a linearity regularization is explicitly added into the objective function of SC methods. More importantly, the proposed SEC framework can naturally deal with out-of-sample data. We also present a new Laplacian matrix constructed from a local regression of each pattern and incorporate it into our SEC framework to capture both local and global discriminative information for clustering. Comprehensive experiments on eight real-world high-dimensional datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of our SEC framework over existing SC methods and K-means-based clustering methods. Our SEC framework significantly outperforms SC using the Nystrom algorithm on unseen data. We extend spectral methods to random graphs with skewed degree distributions through a degree based normalization closely connected to the normalized Laplacian. The normalization is based on intuition drawn from perturbation theory of random matrices, and has the effect of boosting the expectation of the random adjacency matrix without increasing the variances of its entries, leading to better perturbation bounds. The primary implication of this result lies in the realm of spectral analysis of random graphs with skewed degree distributions, such as the ubiquitous "power law graphs". Mihail and Papadimitriou (2002) argued that for randomly generated graphs satisfying a power law degree distribution, spectral analysis of the adjacency matrix simply produces the neighborhoods of the high degree nodes as its eigenvectors, and thus miss any embedded structure. We present a generalization of their model, incorporating latent structure, and prove that after applying our transformation, spectral analysis succeeds in recovering the latent structure with high probability. Spectral clustering aims to partition a data set into several groups by using the Laplacian of the graph such that data points in the same group are similar while data points in different groups are dissimilar to each other. Spectral clustering is very simple to implement and has many advantages over the traditional clustering algorithms such as k-means. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) factorizes a non-negative data matrix into a product of two non-negative (lower rank) matrices so as to achieve dimension reduction and part-based data representation. In this work, we proved that the spectral clustering under some conditions is equivalent to NMF. Unlike the previous work, we formulate the spectral clustering as a factorization of data matrix (or scaled data matrix) rather than the symmetrical factorization of the symmetrical pairwise similarity matrix as the previous study did. Under the NMF framework, where regularization can be easily incorporated into the spectral clustering, we propose several non-negative and sparse spectral clustering algorithms. Empirical studies on real world data show much better clustering accuracy of the proposed algorithms than some state-of-the-art methods such as ratio cut and normalized cut spectral clustering and non-negative Laplacian embedding. HighlightsWe proved that the spectral clustering is equivalent to NMF.Under the NMF framework, we propose nonnegative sparse spectral clustering model.We propose several algorithms to solve the proposed models.Experiment results on real world data show much better performance. Spectral clustering is a standard approach to label nodes on a graph by studying the (largest or lowest) eigenvalues of a symmetric real matrix such as e.g. the adjacency or the Laplacian. Recently, it has been argued that using instead a more complicated, non-symmetric and higher dimensional operator, related to the non-backtracking walk on the graph, leads to improved performance in detecting clusters, and even to optimal performance for the stochastic block model. Here, we propose to use instead a simpler object, a symmetric real matrix known as the Bethe Hessian operator, or deformed Laplacian. We show that this approach combines the performances of the non-backtracking operator, thus detecting clusters all the way down to the theoretical limit in the stochastic block model, with the computational, theoretical and memory advantages of real symmetric matrices. Ng-Jordan-Weiss (NJW) method is one of the most widely used spectral clustering algorithms. For a K clustering problem, this method partitions data using the largest K eigenvectors of the normalized affinity matrix derived from the dataset. It has been demonstrated that the spectral relaxation solution of K-way grouping is located on the subspace of the largest K eigenvectors. However, we find from a lot of experiments that the top K eigenvectors cannot always detect the structure of the data for real pattern recognition problems. So it is necessary to select eigenvectors for spectral clustering. We propose an eigenvector selection method based on entropy ranking for spectral clustering (ESBER). In this method, first all the eigenvectors are ranked according to their importance on clustering, and then a suitable eigenvector combination is obtained from the ranking list. In this paper, we propose two strategies to select eigenvectors in the ranking list of eigenvectors. One is directly adopting the first K eigenvectors in the ranking list. Different to the largest K eigenvectors of NJW method, these K eigenvectors are the most important eigenvectors among all the eigenvectors. The other eigenvector selection strategy is to search a suitable eigenvector combination among the first Km (Km>K) eigenvectors in the ranking list. The eigenvector combination obtained by this strategy can reflect the structure of the original data and lead to a satisfying spectral clustering result. Furthermore, we also present computational complexity reduction strategies for ESBER method to deal with large-scale datasets. We have performed experiments on UCI benchmark datasets, MNIST handwritten digits datasets, and Brodatz texture datasets, adopting NJW method for a baseline comparison. The experimental results show that ESBER method is more robust than NJW method. Especially, ESBER method with the latter eigenvector selection strategy can obtain satisfying clustering results in most cases. Spectral clustering refers to a flexible class of clustering procedures that can produce high-quality clusterings on small data sets but which has limited applicability to large-scale problems due to its computational complexity of O(n3) in general, with n the number of data points. We extend the range of spectral clustering by developing a general framework for fast approximate spectral clustering in which a distortion-minimizing local transformation is first applied to the data. This framework is based on a theoretical analysis that provides a statistical characterization of the effect of local distortion on the mis-clustering rate. We develop two concrete instances of our general framework, one based on local k-means clustering (KASP) and one based on random projection trees (RASP). Extensive experiments show that these algorithms can achieve significant speedups with little degradation in clustering accuracy. Specifically, our algorithms outperform k-means by a large margin in terms of accuracy, and run several times faster than approximate spectral clustering based on the Nystrom method, with comparable accuracy and significantly smaller memory footprint. Remarkably, our algorithms make it possible for a single machine to spectral cluster data sets with a million observations within several minutes. We consider the problem of identifying underlying community-like structures in graphs. Toward this end, we study the stochastic block model (SBM) on k-clusters: a random model on n = km vertices, partitioned in k equal sized clusters, with edges sampled independently across clusters with probability q and within clusters with probability p, p > q. The goal is to recover the initial “hidden” partition of [n]. We study semidefinite programming (SDP)-based algorithms in this context. In the regime (p = (m) m ) and (q = (m) m ), we show that a certain natural SDP-based algorithm solves the problem of exact recovery in the k-community SBM, with high probability, whenever ( - > 1 ), as long as (k=o( n) ). This threshold is known to be the information theoretically optimal. We also study the case when (k= ( (n)) ). In this case however, we achieve recovery guarantees that no longer match the optimal condition ( - > 1 ), thus leaving achieving optimality for this range an open question.