Robust path-based spectral clustering

  • Authors:
  • Hong Chang;Dit-Yan Yeung

  • Affiliations:
  • Xerox Research Centre Europe, 6 chemin de Maupertuis, 38240 Meylan, France;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Spectral clustering and path-based clustering are two recently developed clustering approaches that have delivered impressive results in a number of challenging clustering tasks. However, they are not robust enough against noise and outliers in the data. In this paper, based on M-estimation from robust statistics, we develop a robust path-based spectral clustering method by defining a robust path-based similarity measure for spectral clustering under both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. Our proposed method is significantly more robust than spectral clustering and path-based clustering. We have performed experiments based on both synthetic and real-world data, comparing our method with some other methods. In particular, color images from the Berkeley segmentation data set and benchmark are used in the image segmentation experiments. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms other methods due to its higher robustness.