Soft Clustering on Graphs

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18 (NIPS 2005)

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Authors

Kai Yu, Shipeng Yu, Volker Tresp

Abstract

We propose a simple clustering framework on graphs encoding pairwise data similarities. Unlike usual similarity-based methods, the approach softly assigns data to clusters in a probabilistic way. More importantly, a hierarchical clustering is naturally derived in this framework to gradually merge lower-level clusters into higher-level ones. A random walk analysis indicates that the algorithm exposes clustering structures in various resolutions, i.e., a higher level statistically models a longer-term diffusion on graphs and thus discovers a more global clustering structure. Finally we provide very encouraging experimental results.