Bipartite graph partitioning and data clustering

Many data types arising from data mining applications can be modeled as bipartite graphs, examples include terms and documents in a text corpus, customers and purchasing items in market basket analysis and reviewers and movies in a movie recommender system. In this paper, we propose a new data clustering method based on partitioning the underlying bipartite graph. The partition is constructed by minimizing a normalized sum of edge weights between unmatched pairs of vertices of the bipartite graph. We show that an approximate solution to the minimization problem can be obtained by computing a partial singular value decomposition (SVD) of the associated edge weight matrix of the bipartite graph. We point out the connection of our clustering algorithm to correspondence analysis used in multivariate analysis. We also briefly discuss the issue of assigning data objects to multiple clusters. In the experimental results, we apply our clustering algorithm to the problem of document clustering to illustrate its effectiveness and efficiency.Comment: Proceedings of ACM CIKM 2001, the Tenth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 200

Unifying Sparsest Cut, Cluster Deletion, and Modularity Clustering Objectives with Correlation Clustering

Graph clustering, or community detection, is the task of identifying groups of closely related objects in a large network. In this paper we introduce a new community-detection framework called LambdaCC that is based on a specially weighted version of correlation clustering. A key component in our methodology is a clustering resolution parameter, $\lambda$, which implicitly controls the size and structure of clusters formed by our framework. We show that, by increasing this parameter, our objective effectively interpolates between two different strategies in graph clustering: finding a sparse cut and forming dense subgraphs. Our methodology unifies and generalizes a number of other important clustering quality functions including modularity, sparsest cut, and cluster deletion, and places them all within the context of an optimization problem that has been well studied from the perspective of approximation algorithms. Our approach is particularly relevant in the regime of finding dense clusters, as it leads to a 2-approximation for the cluster deletion problem. We use our approach to cluster several graphs, including large collaboration networks and social networks

Clustering and Community Detection in Directed Networks: A Survey

Networks (or graphs) appear as dominant structures in diverse domains, including sociology, biology, neuroscience and computer science. In most of the aforementioned cases graphs are directed - in the sense that there is directionality on the edges, making the semantics of the edges non symmetric. An interesting feature that real networks present is the clustering or community structure property, under which the graph topology is organized into modules commonly called communities or clusters. The essence here is that nodes of the same community are highly similar while on the contrary, nodes across communities present low similarity. Revealing the underlying community structure of directed complex networks has become a crucial and interdisciplinary topic with a plethora of applications. Therefore, naturally there is a recent wealth of research production in the area of mining directed graphs - with clustering being the primary method and tool for community detection and evaluation. The goal of this paper is to offer an in-depth review of the methods presented so far for clustering directed networks along with the relevant necessary methodological background and also related applications. The survey commences by offering a concise review of the fundamental concepts and methodological base on which graph clustering algorithms capitalize on. Then we present the relevant work along two orthogonal classifications. The first one is mostly concerned with the methodological principles of the clustering algorithms, while the second one approaches the methods from the viewpoint regarding the properties of a good cluster in a directed network. Further, we present methods and metrics for evaluating graph clustering results, demonstrate interesting application domains and provide promising future research directions.Comment: 86 pages, 17 figures. Physics Reports Journal (To Appear

Extracting information from informal communication

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-93).This thesis focuses on the problem of extracting information from informal communication. Textual informal communication, such as e-mail, bulletin boards and blogs, has become a vast information resource. However, such information is poorly organized and difficult for a computer to understand due to lack of editing and structure. Thus, techniques which work well for formal text, such as newspaper articles, may be considered insufficient on informal text. One focus of ours is to attempt to advance the state-of-the-art for sub-problems of the information extraction task. We make contributions to the problems of named entity extraction, co-reference resolution and context tracking. We channel our efforts toward methods which are particularly applicable to informal communication. We also consider a type of information which is somewhat unique to informal communication: preferences and opinions. Individuals often expression their opinions on products and services in such communication. Others' may read these "reviews" to try to predict their own experiences. However, humans do a poor job of aggregating and generalizing large sets of data. We develop techniques that can perform the job of predicting unobserved opinions.(cont.) We address both the single-user case where information about the items is known, and the multi-user case where we can generalize opinions without external information. Experiments on large-scale rating data sets validate our approach.by Jason D.M. Rennie.Ph.D

Adaptive Graph via Multiple Kernel Learning for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) has been continuously evolving in several areas like pattern recognition and information retrieval methods. It factorizes a matrix into a product of 2 low-rank non-negative matrices that will define parts-based, and linear representation of nonnegative data. Recently, Graph regularized NMF (GrNMF) is proposed to find a compact representation,which uncovers the hidden semantics and simultaneously respects the intrinsic geometric structure. In GNMF, an affinity graph is constructed from the original data space to encode the geometrical information. In this paper, we propose a novel idea which engages a Multiple Kernel Learning approach into refining the graph structure that reflects the factorization of the matrix and the new data space. The GrNMF is improved by utilizing the graph refined by the kernel learning, and then a novel kernel learning method is introduced under the GrNMF framework. Our approach shows encouraging results of the proposed algorithm in comparison to the state-of-the-art clustering algorithms like NMF, GrNMF, SVD etc.Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to the terrible writin