Covariate-assisted spectral clustering

Biological and social systems consist of myriad interacting units. The interactions can be represented in the form of a graph or network. Measurements of these graphs can reveal the underlying structure of these interactions, which provides insight into the systems that generated the graphs. Moreover, in applications such as connectomics, social networks, and genomics, graph data are accompanied by contextualizing measures on each node. We utilize these node covariates to help uncover latent communities in a graph, using a modification of spectral clustering. Statistical guarantees are provided under a joint mixture model that we call the node-contextualized stochastic blockmodel, including a bound on the mis-clustering rate. The bound is used to derive conditions for achieving perfect clustering. For most simulated cases, covariate-assisted spectral clustering yields results superior to regularized spectral clustering without node covariates and to an adaptation of canonical correlation analysis. We apply our clustering method to large brain graphs derived from diffusion MRI data, using the node locations or neurological region membership as covariates. In both cases, covariate-assisted spectral clustering yields clusters that are easier to interpret neurologically.Comment: 28 pages, 4 figures, includes substantial changes to theoretical result

Hearing the clusters in a graph: A distributed algorithm

We propose a novel distributed algorithm to cluster graphs. The algorithm recovers the solution obtained from spectral clustering without the need for expensive eigenvalue/vector computations. We prove that, by propagating waves through the graph, a local fast Fourier transform yields the local component of every eigenvector of the Laplacian matrix, thus providing clustering information. For large graphs, the proposed algorithm is orders of magnitude faster than random walk based approaches. We prove the equivalence of the proposed algorithm to spectral clustering and derive convergence rates. We demonstrate the benefit of using this decentralized clustering algorithm for community detection in social graphs, accelerating distributed estimation in sensor networks and efficient computation of distributed multi-agent search strategies

Fast Approximate Spectral Clustering for Dynamic Networks

Spectral clustering is a widely studied problem, yet its complexity is prohibitive for dynamic graphs of even modest size. We claim that it is possible to reuse information of past cluster assignments to expedite computation. Our approach builds on a recent idea of sidestepping the main bottleneck of spectral clustering, i.e., computing the graph eigenvectors, by using fast Chebyshev graph filtering of random signals. We show that the proposed algorithm achieves clustering assignments with quality approximating that of spectral clustering and that it can yield significant complexity benefits when the graph dynamics are appropriately bounded

Spectral density of the non-backtracking operator

The non-backtracking operator was recently shown to provide a significant improvement when used for spectral clustering of sparse networks. In this paper we analyze its spectral density on large random sparse graphs using a mapping to the correlation functions of a certain interacting quantum disordered system on the graph. On sparse, tree-like graphs, this can be solved efficiently by the cavity method and a belief propagation algorithm. We show that there exists a paramagnetic phase, leading to zero spectral density, that is stable outside a circle of radius $\sqrt{\rho}$, where $\rho$ is the leading eigenvalue of the non-backtracking operator. We observe a second-order phase transition at the edge of this circle, between a zero and a non-zero spectral density. That fact that this phase transition is absent in the spectral density of other matrices commonly used for spectral clustering provides a physical justification of the performances of the non-backtracking operator in spectral clustering.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures, submitted to EP

Higher-Order Spectral Clustering for Geometric Graphs

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.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure