The performance of spectral clustering heavily relies on the quality of affinity matrix. A variety of affinity-matrix-construction methods have been proposed but they have hyper-parameters to determine beforehand, which requires strong experience and lead to difficulty in real applications especially when the inter-cluster similarity is high or/and the dataset is large. On the other hand, we often have to determine to use a linear model or a nonlinear model, which still depends on experience. To solve these two problems, in this paper, we present an eigen-gap guided search method for subspace clustering. The main idea is to find the most reliable affinity matrix among a set of candidates constructed by linear and kernel regressions, where the reliability is quantified by the textit{relative-eigen-gap} of graph Laplacian defined in this paper. We show, theoretically and numerically, that the Laplacian matrix with a larger relative-eigen-gap often yields a higher clustering accuracy and stability. Our method is able to automatically search the best model and hyper-parameters in a pre-defined space. The search space is very easy to determine and can be arbitrarily large, though a relatively compact search space can reduce the highly unnecessary computation. Our method has high flexibility and convenience in real applications, and also has low computational cost because the affinity matrix is not computed by iterative optimization. We extend the method to large-scale datasets such as MNIST, on which the time cost is less than 90s and the clustering accuracy is state-of-the-art. Extensive experiments of natural image clustering show that our method is more stable, accurate, and efficient than baseline methods.
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