GANC: Greedy agglomerative normalized cut for graph clustering

  • Authors:
  • Seyed Salim Tabatabaei;Mark Coates;Michael Rabbat

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, McConnell Engineering Building, 3480 University Street, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2A7;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, McConnell Engineering Building, 3480 University Street, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2A7;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, McGill University, McConnell Engineering Building, 3480 University Street, Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2A7

  • Venue:
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.01

Visualization

Abstract

This paper describes a graph clustering algorithm that aims to minimize the normalized cut criterion and has a model order selection procedure. The performance of the proposed algorithm is comparable to spectral approaches in terms of minimizing normalized cut. However unlike spectral approaches, the proposed algorithm scales to graphs with millions of nodes and edges. The algorithm consists of three components that are processed sequentially: a greedy agglomerative hierarchical clustering procedure, model order selection, and a local refinement. For a graph of n nodes and O(n) edges, the computational complexity of the algorithm is O(nlog^2n), a major improvement over the O(n^3) complexity of spectral methods. Experiments are performed on real and synthetic networks to demonstrate the scalability of the proposed approach, the effectiveness of the model order selection procedure, and the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of minimizing the normalized cut metric.