Parallel spectral clustering

Abstract

Spectral clustering algorithm has been shown to be more effective in finding clusters than most traditional algorithms. However, spectral clustering suffers from a scalability problem in both memory use and computational time when a dataset size is large. To perform clustering on large datasets, we propose to parallelize both memory use and computation on distributed computers. Through an empirical study on a large document dataset of 193,844 data instances and a large photo dataset of 637,137, we demonstrate that our parallel algorithm can effectively alleviate the scalability problem. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.