DGCLUSTER: A Neural Framework for Attributed Graph Clustering via Modularity Maximization

Abstract

Graph clustering is a fundamental and challenging task in the field of graph mining where the objective is to group the nodes into clusters taking into consideration the topology of the graph. It has several applications in diverse domains spanning social network analysis, recommender systems, computer vision, and bioinformatics. In this work, we propose a novel method, DGCLUSTER, which primarily optimizes the modularity objective using graph neural networks and scales linearly with the graph size. Our method does not require the number of clusters to be specified as a part of the input and can also leverage the availability of auxiliary node level information. We extensively test DGCLUSTER on several real-world datasets of varying sizes, across multiple popular cluster quality metrics. Our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating significant performance gains in almost all settings.