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An improved spectral clustering algorithm based on random walk

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Abstract

The construction process for a similarity matrix has an important impact on the performance of spectral clustering algorithms. In this paper, we propose a random walk based approach to process the Gaussian kernel similarity matrix. In this method, the pair-wise similarity between two data points is not only related to the two points, but also related to their neighbors. As a result, the new similarity matrix is closer to the ideal matrix which can provide the best clustering result. We give a theoretical analysis of the similarity matrix and apply this similarity matrix to spectral clustering. We also propose a method to handle noisy items which may cause deterioration of clustering performance. Experimental results on real-world data sets show that the proposed spectral clustering algorithm significantly outperforms existing algorithms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, 116623, China

    Xianchao Zhang & Quanzeng You

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  1. Xianchao Zhang
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  2. Quanzeng You
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Correspondence to Xianchao Zhang.

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Xianchao Zhang is a full professor at Dalian University of Technology, China. He received his B.S degree in Applied Mathematics and M.S. degree in Computational Mathematics from National University of Defense Technology in 1994 and 1998, respectively. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Theory and Software from University of Science and Technology of China in 2000. He joined Dalian University of Technology in 2003 after 2 years of industrial working experience at international companies. He worked as Visiting Scholar at The Australian National University and The City University of Hong Kong in 2005 and 2009, respectively. His research interests include algorithms, machine learning, data mining and information retrieval.

Quanzeng You received his B.S. degree from School of Software, Dalian University of Technology, China in 2009. He is Current a master candidate at Dalian University of Technology, China. He joined the Lab of Intelligent Information Processing at DUT in 2009, under the supervision of Prof. Xianchao Zhang. His research interests include spectral clustering, clustering, semi-supervised learning and other data mining techniques. He is especially interested in spectral methods. Currently, his research mainly focuses on the improvement of spectral clustering and how to apply spectral clustering to large scale problems.

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Zhang, X., You, Q. An improved spectral clustering algorithm based on random walk. Front. Comput. Sci. China 5, 268–278 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-011-0023-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-011-0023-0

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