Enhanced affinity for spectral clustering using topological node features (TNFS)

Abstract

Data clustering is an active topic of research as it has applications in various fields such as biology, management, statistics, pattern recognition, etc. Spectral Clustering (SC) has gained popularity in recent times due to its ability to handle complex data and ease of implementation. A crucial step in spectral clustering is the construction of the affinity matrix, which is based on a pairwise similarity measure. The varied characteristics of datasets affect the performance of a spectral clustering technique. In this paper, we have proposed an affinity measure based on Topological Node Features (TNFs) viz., Clustering Coefficient (CC) and Summation index (SI) to define the notion of density and local structure. It has been shown that these features improve the performance of SC in clustering the data. The experiments were conducted on synthetic datasets, UCI datasets, and the MNIST handwritten datasets. The results show that the proposed affinity metric outperforms several recent spectral clustering methods in terms of accuracy.