Fast density-weighted low-rank approximation spectral clustering

Abstract

While spectral clustering can produce high-quality clusterings on small data sets, computational cost makes it infeasible for large data sets. Affinity Propagation (AP) has a limitation that it is hard to determine the value of parameter `preference' which can lead to an optimal clustering solution. These problems limit the scope of application of the two methods. In this paper, we develop a novel fast two-stage spectral clustering framework with local and global consistency. Under this framework, we propose a Fast density-Weighted low-rank Approximation Spectral Clustering (FWASC) algorithm to address the above issues. The proposed algorithm is a high-quality graph partitioning method, and simultaneously considers both the local and global structure information contained in the data sets. Specifically, we first present a new Fast Two-Stage AP (FTSAP) algorithm to coarsen the input sparse graph and produce a small number of final representative exemplars, which is a simple and efficient sampling scheme. Then we present a density-weighted low-rank approximation spectral clustering algorithm to operate those representative exemplars on the global underlying structure of data manifold. Experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art spectral clustering and original AP algorithms in terms of speed, memory usage, and quality.