Clustering Vertices in Weighted Graphs

Abstract

Clustering is the unsupervised process of discovering natural clusters so that objects within the same cluster are similar and objects from different clusters are dissimilar. In clustering, if similarity relations between objects are represented as a simple, weighted graph where objects are vertices and similarities between objects are weights of edges; clustering reduces to the problem of graph clustering. A natural notion of graph clustering is the separation of sparsely connected dense sub graphs from each other based on the notion of intra-cluster density vs. inter-cluster sparseness. In this chapter, we overview existing graph algorithms for clustering vertices in weighted graphs: Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) clustering, Markov clustering, and Star clustering. This includes the variants of Star clustering, MST clustering and Ricochet.