CS250: Python for Data Science

Spectral clustering combines some of the approaches described above to create a stronger clustering method.

First of all, this algorithm requires us to define the similarity matrix for observations called the adjacency matrix. This can be done in a similar fashion as in the Affinity Propagation algorithm: $A_{i,j}=−||x_i−x_j||^2$. This matrix describes a full graph with the observations as vertices and the estimated similarity value between a pair of observations as edge weights for that pair of vertices. For the metric defined above and two-dimensional observations, this is pretty intuitive - two observations are similar if the edge between them is shorter. We'd like to split up the graph into two subgraphs in such a way that each observation in each subgraph would be similar to another observation in that subgraph. Formally, this is a Normalized cuts problem.