Spectral concentration and greedy k-clustering

A popular graph clustering method is to consider the embedding of an input graph into induced by the first k eigenvectors of its Laplacian, and to partition the graph via geometric manipulations on the resulting metric space. Despite the practical success of this methodology, there is limited understanding of several heuristics that follow this framework. We provide theoretical justification for one such natural and computationally efficient variant. Our result can be summarized as follows. A partition of a graph is called strong if each cluster has small external conductance, and large internal conductance. We present a simple greedy spectral clustering algorithm which returns a partition that is provably close to a suitably strong partition, provided that such a partition exists. A recent result shows that strong partitions exist for graphs with a sufficiently large spectral gap between the k-th and (k+1) -st eigenvalues. Taking this together with our main theorem gives a spectral algorithm which finds a partition close to a strong one for graphs with large enough spectral gap. We also show how this simple greedy algorithm can be implemented in near-linear time for any fixed k and error guarantee. Finally, we evaluate our algorithm on some real-world and synthetic inputs

Optimal Data Collection For Informative Rankings Expose Well-Connected Graphs

Given a graph where vertices represent alternatives and arcs represent pairwise comparison data, the statistical ranking problem is to find a potential function, defined on the vertices, such that the gradient of the potential function agrees with the pairwise comparisons. Our goal in this paper is to develop a method for collecting data for which the least squares estimator for the ranking problem has maximal Fisher information. Our approach, based on experimental design, is to view data collection as a bi-level optimization problem where the inner problem is the ranking problem and the outer problem is to identify data which maximizes the informativeness of the ranking. Under certain assumptions, the data collection problem decouples, reducing to a problem of finding multigraphs with large algebraic connectivity. This reduction of the data collection problem to graph-theoretic questions is one of the primary contributions of this work. As an application, we study the Yahoo! Movie user rating dataset and demonstrate that the addition of a small number of well-chosen pairwise comparisons can significantly increase the Fisher informativeness of the ranking. As another application, we study the 2011-12 NCAA football schedule and propose schedules with the same number of games which are significantly more informative. Using spectral clustering methods to identify highly-connected communities within the division, we argue that the NCAA could improve its notoriously poor rankings by simply scheduling more out-of-conference games.Comment: 31 pages, 10 figures, 3 table