Accrue Software, Inc. Clustering is a division of data into groups of similar objects. Representing the data by fewer clusters necessarily loses certain fine details, but achieves simplification. It models data by its clusters. Data modeling puts clustering in a historical perspective rooted in mathematics, statistics, and numerical analysis. From a machine learning perspective clusters correspond to hidden patterns, the search for clusters is unsupervised learning, and the resulting system represents a data concept. From a practical perspective clustering plays an outstanding role in data mining applications such as scientific data exploration, information retrieval and text mining, spatial database applications, Web analysis, CRM, marketing, medical diagnostics, computational biology, and many others. Clustering is the subject of active research in several fields such as statistics, pattern recognition, and machine learning. This survey focuses on clustering in data mining. Data mining adds to clustering the complications of very large datasets with very many attributes of different types. This imposes unique

Consistency is a key property of statistical algorithms, when the data is drawn from some underlying probability distribution. Surprisingly, despite decades of work, little is known about consistency of most clustering algorithms. In this paper we investigate consistency of a popular family of spectral clustering algorithms, which cluster the data with the help of eigenvectors of graph Laplacian matrices. We show that one of the two of major classes of spectral clustering (normalized clustering) converges under some very general conditions, while the other (unnormalized), is only consistent under strong additional assumptions, which, as we demonstrate, are not always satisfied in real data. We conclude that our analysis provides strong evidence for the superiority of normalized spectral clustering in practical applications. We believe that methods used in our analysis will provide a basis for future exploration of Laplacian-based methods in a statistical setting.

We present a new view of clustering and segmentation by pairwise similarities. We interpret the similarities as edge flows in a Markov random walk and study the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the walk's transition matrix. This view shows that spectral methods for clustering and segmentation have a probabilistic foundation. We prove that the Normalized Cut method arises naturally from our framework and we provide a complete characterization of the cases when the Normalized Cut algorithm is exact. Then we discuss other spectral segmentation and clustering methods showing that they are essentially the same as NCut.

Abstract We present a new view of image segmentation by pairwise similarities. We interpret the similarities as edge flows in a Markov random walk and study the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the walk's transition matrix. This interpretation shows that spectral methods for clustering and segmentation have a probabilistic foundation. In particular, we prove that the Normalized Cut method arises naturally from our framework. Finally, the framework provides a principled method for learning the similarity function as a combination of features. 1 Introduction Among the most successful methods in image segmentation combine a global optimality segmentation criterion with local similarity features[3]. Similarity between two pixels i; j is defined as a positive function Sij depending on the local image properties of the pixels(e.g. color, texture, edge flow). Local features are not only computationally convenient, they are also supported by neurological evidence about the human perception of shapes.

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Abstract—The data stream model has recently attracted attention for its applicability to numerous types of data, including telephone records, Web documents, and clickstreams. For analysis of such data, the ability to process the data in a single pass, or a small number of passes, while using little memory, is crucial. We describe such a streaming algorithm that effectively clusters large data streams. We also provide empirical evidence of the algorithm’s performance on synthetic and real data streams. Index Terms—Clustering, data streams, approximation algorithms. 1

A large body of work has been devoted to identifying community structure in networks. A community is often though of as a set of nodes that has more connections between its members than to the remainder of the network. In this paper, we characterize as a function of size the statistical and structural properties of such sets of nodes. We define the network community profile plot, which characterizes the “best ” possible community—according to the conductance measure—over a wide range of size scales, and we study over 70 large sparse real-world networks taken from a wide range of application domains. Our results suggest a significantly more refined picture of community structure in large real-world networks than has been appreciated previously. Our most striking finding is that in nearly every network dataset we examined, we observe tight but almost trivial communities at very small scales, and at larger size scales, the best possible communities gradually “blend in ” with the rest of the network and thus become less “community-like.” This behavior is not explained, even at a qualitative level, by any of the commonly-used network generation models. Moreover, this behavior is exactly the opposite of what one would expect based on experience with and intuition from expander graphs, from graphs that are well-embeddable in a low-dimensional structure, and from small social networks that have served as testbeds of community detection algorithms. We have found, however, that a generative model, in which new edges are added via an iterative “forest fire” burning process, is able to produce graphs exhibiting a network community structure similar to our observations.

Problems such as bisection, graph coloring, and clique are generally believed hard in the worst case. However, they can be solved if the input data is drawn randomly from a distribution over graphs containing acceptable solutions. In this paper we show that a simple spectral algorithm can solve all three problems above in the average case, as well as a more general problem of partitioning graphs based on edge density. In nearly all cases our approach meets or exceeds previous parameters, while introducing substantial generality. We apply spectral techniques, using foremost the observation that in all of these problems, the expected adjacency matrix is a low rank matrix wherein the structure of the solution is evident.

Recently, there have been a number of algorithms proposed for analyzing hypertext link structure so as to determine the best "authorities" for a given topic or query. While such analysis is usually combined with content analysis, there is a sense in which some algorithms are deemed to be "more balanced" and others "more focused". We undertake a comparative study of hypertext link analysis algorithms. Guided by some experimental queries, we propose some formal criteria for evaluating and comparing link analysis algorithms. Keywords: link analysis, web searching, hubs, authorities, SALSA, Kleinberg's algorithm, threshold, Bayesian. 1

Abstract. In recent years manifold methods have attracted a considerable amount of attention in machine learning. However most algorithms in that class may be termed “manifold-motivated ” as they lack any explicit theoretical guarantees. In this paper we take a step towards closing the gap between theory and practice for a class of Laplacian-based manifold methods. We show that under certain conditions the graph Laplacian of a point cloud converges to the Laplace-Beltrami operator on the underlying manifold. Theorem 1 contains the first result showing convergence of a random graph Laplacian to manifold Laplacian in the machine learning context. 1