Clustering Large Attributed Graphs: An Efficient Incremental Approach by Yang Zhou, Hong Cheng, and Jeffrey Xu Yu. (PDF file)
Abstract:
In recent years, many networks have become available for analysis, including social networks, sensor networks, biological networks, etc. Graph clustering has shown its effectiveness in analyzing and visualizing large networks. The goal of graph clustering is to partition vertices in a large graph into clusters based on various criteria such as vertex connectivity or neighborhood similarity. Many existing graph clustering methods mainly focus on the topological structures, but largely ignore the vertex properties which are often heterogeneous. Recently, a new graph clustering algorithm, SA-Cluster, has been proposed which combines structural and attribute similarities through a unified distance measure. SACluster performs matrix multiplication to calculate the random walk distances between graph vertices. As the edge weights are iteratively adjusted to balance the importance between structural and attribute similarities, matrix multiplication is repeated in each iteration of the clustering process to recalculate the random walk distances which are affected by the edge weight update.
In order to improve the efficiency and scalability of SA-Cluster, in this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm Inc-Cluster to incrementally update the random walk distances given the edge weight increments. Complexity analysis is provided to estimate how much runtime cost Inc-Cluster can save. Experimental results demonstrate that Inc-Cluster achieves significant speedup over SA-Cluster on large graphs, while achieving exactly the same clustering quality in terms of intra-cluster structural cohesiveness and attribute value homogeneity.
Seeing this reminded me that I need to review the other papers presented at the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining. The problem is that papers that seem the most relevant at one time, six months later don’t seem as relevant as they once did. Same papers, same person looking at them. Passage of time and other papers I suspect.
Graph algorithms continue to improve, if you are working with large graphs, suggest you give some time to this paper.