Clustering and Community Detection with Imbalanced Clusters

Spectral clustering methods which are frequently used in clustering and community detection applications are sensitive to the specific graph constructions particularly when imbalanced clusters are present. We show that ratio cut (RCut) or normalized cut (NCut) objectives are not tailored to imbalanced cluster sizes since they tend to emphasize cut sizes over cut values. We propose a graph partitioning problem that seeks minimum cut partitions under minimum size constraints on partitions to deal with imbalanced cluster sizes. Our approach parameterizes a family of graphs by adaptively modulating node degrees on a fixed node set, yielding a set of parameter dependent cuts reflecting varying levels of imbalance. The solution to our problem is then obtained by optimizing over these parameters. We present rigorous limit cut analysis results to justify our approach and demonstrate the superiority of our method through experiments on synthetic and real datasets for data clustering, semi-supervised learning and community detection.Comment: Extended version of arXiv:1309.2303 with new applications. Accepted to IEEE TSIP

SVD, discrepancy, and regular structure of contingency tables

We will use the factors obtained by correspondence analysis to find biclustering of a contingency table such that the row-column cluster pairs are regular, i.e., they have small discrepancy. In our main theorem, the constant of the so-called volume-regularity is related to the SVD of the normalized contingency table. Our result is applicable to two-way cuts when both the rows and columns are divided into the same number of clusters, thus extending partly the result of Butler estimating the discrepancy of a contingency table by the second largest singular value of the normalized table (one-cluster, rectangular case), and partly a former result of the author for estimating the constant of volume-regularity by the structural eigenvalues and the distances of the corresponding eigen-subspaces of the normalized modularity matrix of an edge-weighted graph (several clusters, symmetric case)

Spectral Clustering with Imbalanced Data

Spectral clustering is sensitive to how graphs are constructed from data particularly when proximal and imbalanced clusters are present. We show that Ratio-Cut (RCut) or normalized cut (NCut) objectives are not tailored to imbalanced data since they tend to emphasize cut sizes over cut values. We propose a graph partitioning problem that seeks minimum cut partitions under minimum size constraints on partitions to deal with imbalanced data. Our approach parameterizes a family of graphs, by adaptively modulating node degrees on a fixed node set, to yield a set of parameter dependent cuts reflecting varying levels of imbalance. The solution to our problem is then obtained by optimizing over these parameters. We present rigorous limit cut analysis results to justify our approach. We demonstrate the superiority of our method through unsupervised and semi-supervised experiments on synthetic and real data sets.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1302.513