Generalizing Lloyd’s Algorithm for Graph Clustering

SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, Volume 46, Issue 5, Page A2819-A2847, October 2024.
Abstract. Clustering is a commonplace problem in many areas of data science, with applications in biology and bioinformatics, understanding chemical structure, image segmentation, building recommender systems, and many more fields. While there are many different clustering variants (based on given distance or graph structure, probability distributions, or data density), we consider here the problem of clustering nodes in a graph, motivated by the problem of aggregating discrete degrees of freedom in multigrid and domain decomposition methods for solving sparse linear systems. Specifically, we consider the challenge of forming balanced clusters in the graph of a sparse matrix for use in algebraic multigrid, although the algorithm has general applicability. Based on an extension of the Bellman–Ford algorithm, we generalize Lloyd’s algorithm for partitioning subsets of [math] to balance the number of nodes in each cluster; this is accompanied by a rebalancing algorithm that reduces the overall energy in the system. The algorithm provides control over the number of clusters and leads to “well centered” partitions of the graph. Theoretical results are provided to establish linear complexity and numerical results in the context of algebraic multigrid highlight the benefits of improved clustering. Reproducibility of computational results. This paper has been awarded the “SIAM Reproducibility Badge: Code and data available” as a recognition that the authors have followed reproducibility principles valued by SISC and the scientific computing community. Code and data that allow readers to reproduce the results in this paper are available at https://github.com/lukeolson/paper-lloyd-data and in the supplementary materials (paper-lloyd-data.zip [88.1MB]).