Community Partitioning over Feature-Rich Networks Using an Extended K-Means Method

Abstract

This paper proposes a meaningful and effective extension of the celebrated K-means algorithm to detect communities in feature-rich networks, due to our assumption of non-summability mode. We least-squares approximate given matrices of inter-node links and feature values, leading to a straightforward extension of the conventional K-means clustering method as an alternating minimization strategy for the criterion. This works in a two-fold space, embracing both the network nodes and features. The metric used is a weighted sum of the squared Euclidean distances in the feature and network spaces. To tackle the so-called curse of dimensionality, we extend this to a version that uses the cosine distances between entities and centers. One more version of our method is based on the Manhattan distance metric. We conduct computational experiments to test our method and compare its performances with those by competing popular algorithms at synthetic and real-world datasets. The cosine-based version of the extended K-means typically wins at the high-dimension real-world datasets. In contrast, the Manhattan-based version wins at most synthetic datasets.