Simultaneous Spectral Data Embedding and Clustering

Abstract

Spectral clustering is often carried out by combining spectral data embedding and -means clustering. However, the aims, dimensionality reduction and clustering, are usually not performed jointly. In this brief, we propose a novel approach to finding an optimal spectral embedding for identifying a partition of the set of objects; it iteratively alternates spectral embedding and clustering. In doing so, we show that our model can learn a low-dimensional representation more suited to clustering. Compared with classical spectral clustering methods, the proposed algorithm is not costly and outperforms not only these methods but also other nonnegative matrix factorization variants.