A new affinity matrix weighted k-nearest neighbors graph to improve spectral clustering accuracy

PeerJ Comput Sci. 2021 Sep 6:7:e692. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.692. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Researchers have thought about clustering approaches that incorporate traditional clustering methods and deep learning techniques. These approaches normally boost the performance of clustering. Getting knowledge from large data-sets is quite an interesting task. In this case, we use some dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques. Spectral clustering is gaining popularity recently because of its performance. Lately, numerous techniques have been introduced to boost spectral clustering performance. One of the most significant part of these techniques is to construct a similarity graph. We introduced weighted k-nearest neighbors technique for the construction of similarity graph. Using this new metric for the construction of affinity matrix, we achieved good results as we tested it both on real and artificial data-sets.

Keywords: Affinity matrix; Eigen decomposition; K-nearest neighbors; Spectral clustering.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grants funded by the Korean government under reference number (2020R1A2C1012196). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.