Dimensionality Reduction for Spectral Clustering

Spectral clustering is a flexible clustering methodology that is applicable to a variety of data types and has the particular virtue that it makes few assumptions on cluster shapes. It has become popular in a variety of application areas, particularly in computational vision and bioinformatics. The approach appears, however, to be particularly sensitive to irrelevant and noisy dimensions in the data. We thus introduce an approach that automatically learns the relevant dimensions and spectral clustering simultaneously. We pursue an augmented form of spectral clustering in which an explicit projection operator is incorporated in the relaxed optimization functional. We optimize this functional over both the projection and the spectral embedding. Experiments on simulated and real data show that this approach yields significant improvements in the performance of spectral clustering.