No Arabic abstract
Clustering is an important topic in algorithms, and has a number of applications in machine learning, computer vision, statistics, and several other research disciplines. Traditional objectives of graph clustering are to find clusters with low conductance. Not only are these objectives just applicable for undirected graphs, they are also incapable to take the relationships between clusters into account, which could be crucial for many applications. To overcome these downsides, we study directed graphs (digraphs) whose clusters exhibit further structural information amongst each other. Based on the Hermitian matrix representation of digraphs, we present a nearly-linear time algorithm for digraph clustering, and further show that our proposed algorithm can be implemented in sublinear time under reasonable assumptions. The significance of our theoretical work is demonstrated by extensive experimental results on the UN Comtrade Dataset: the output clustering of our algorithm exhibits not only how the clusters (sets of countries) relate to each other with respect to their import and export records, but also how these clusters evolve over time, in accordance with known facts in international trade.
The present paper is devoted to clustering geometric graphs. While the standard spectral clustering is often not effective for geometric graphs, we present an effective generalization, which we call higher-order spectral clustering. It resembles in concept the classical spectral clustering method but uses for partitioning the eigenvector associated with a higher-order eigenvalue. We establish the weak consistency of this algorithm for a wide class of geometric graphs which we call Soft Geometric Block Model. A small adjustment of the algorithm provides strong consistency. We also show that our method is effective in numerical experiments even for graphs of modest size.
This is a survey of the method of graph cuts and its applications to graph clustering of weighted unsigned and signed graphs. I provide a fairly thorough treatment of the method of normalized graph cuts, a deeply original method due to Shi and Malik, including complete proofs. The main thrust of this paper is the method of normalized cuts. I give a detailed account for K = 2 clusters, and also for K > 2 clusters, based on the work of Yu and Shi. I also show how both graph drawing and normalized cut K-clustering can be easily generalized to handle signed graphs, which are weighted graphs in which the weight matrix W may have negative coefficients. Intuitively, negative coefficients indicate distance or dissimilarity. The solution is to replace the degree matrix by the matrix in which absolute values of the weights are used, and to replace the Laplacian by the Laplacian with the new degree matrix of absolute values. As far as I know, the generalization of K-way normalized clustering to signed graphs is new. Finally, I show how the method of ratio cuts, in which a cut is normalized by the size of the cluster rather than its volume, is just a special case of normalized cuts.
Clustering is fundamental for gaining insights from complex networks, and spectral clustering (SC) is a popular approach. Conventional SC focuses on second-order structures (e.g., edges connecting two nodes) without direct consideration of higher-order structures (e.g., triangles and cliques). This has motivated SC extensions that directly consider higher-order structures. However, both approaches are limited to considering a single order. This paper proposes a new Mixed-Order Spectral Clustering (MOSC) approach to model both second-order and third-order structures simultaneously, with two MOSC methods developed based on Graph Laplacian (GL) and Random Walks (RW). MOSC-GL combines edge and triangle adjacency matrices, with theoretical performance guarantee. MOSC-RW combines first-order and second-order random walks for a probabilistic interpretation. We automatically determine the mixing parameter based on cut criteria or triangle density, and construct new structure-aware error metrics for performance evaluation. Experiments on real-world networks show 1) the superior performance of two MOSC methods over existing SC methods, 2) the effectiveness of the mixing parameter determination strategy, and 3) insights offered by the structure-aware error metrics.
We introduce a family of multi-way Cheeger-type constants ${h_k^{sigma}, k=1,2,ldots, n}$ on a signed graph $Gamma=(G,sigma)$ such that $h_k^{sigma}=0$ if and only if $Gamma$ has $k$ balanced connected components. These constants are switching invariant and bring together in a unified viewpoint a number of important graph-theoretical concepts, including the classical Cheeger constant, those measures of bipartiteness introduced by Desai-Rao, Trevisan, Bauer-Jost, respectively, on unsigned graphs,, and the frustration index (originally called the line index of balance by Harary) on signed graphs. We further unify the (higher-order or improved) Cheeger and dual Cheeger inequalities for unsigned graphs as well as the underlying algorithmic proof techniques by establishing their correspondi
In this report, we study decentralized stochastic optimization to minimize a sum of smooth and strongly convex cost functions when the functions are distributed over a directed network of nodes. In contrast to the existing work, we use gradient tracking to improve certain aspects of the resulting algorithm. In particular, we propose the~textbf{texttt{S-ADDOPT}} algorithm that assumes a stochastic first-order oracle at each node and show that for a constant step-size~$alpha$, each node converges linearly inside an error ball around the optimal solution, the size of which is controlled by~$alpha$. For decaying step-sizes~$mathcal{O}(1/k)$, we show that~textbf{texttt{S-ADDOPT}} reaches the exact solution sublinearly at~$mathcal{O}(1/k)$ and its convergence is asymptotically network-independent. Thus the asymptotic behavior of~textbf{texttt{S-ADDOPT}} is comparable to the centralized stochastic gradient descent. Numerical experiments over both strongly convex and non-convex problems illustrate the convergence behavior and the performance comparison of the proposed algorithm.