A probabilistic framework for graph clustering

Abstract

The paper describes a probabilistic framework for graph clustering. We commence from a set of pairwise distances between graph structures. From this set of distances, we use a mixture model to characterize the pairwise affinity of the different graphs. We present an EM-like algorithm for clustering the graphs by iteratively updating the elements of the affinity matrix. In the M-step we apply eigendcomposition to the affinity matrix to locate the principal clusters. In the M-step we update the affinity probabilities. We apply the resulting unsupervised clustering algorithm to two practical problems. The first of these involves locating shape-categories using shock trees extracted from 2D silhouettes. The second problem involves finding the view structure of a polyhedral object using the Delaunay triangulation of corner features.