A model-based approach to attributed graph clustering

• Main Authors: Xu, Zhiqiang, Ke, Yiping, Wang, Yi, Cheng, Hong, Cheng, James
• Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/98766; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/12623
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Graph clustering, also known as community detection, is a long-standing problem in data mining. However, with the proliferation of rich attribute information available for objects in real-world graphs, how to leverage structural and attribute information for clustering attributed graphs becomes a new challenge. Most existing works take a distance-based approach. They proposed various distance measures to combine structural and attribute information. In this paper, we consider an alternative view and propose a model-based approach to attributed graph clustering. We develop a Bayesian probabilistic model for attributed graphs. The model provides a principled and natural framework for capturing both structural and attribute aspects of a graph, while avoiding the artificial design of a distance measure. Clustering with the proposed model can be transformed into a probabilistic inference problem, for which we devise an efficient variational algorithm. Experimental results on large real-world datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-art distance-based attributed graph clustering method.