Non-negative and sparse spectral clustering

•We proved that the spectral clustering is equivalent to NMF.•Under the NMF framework, we propose nonnegative sparse spectral clustering model.•We propose several algorithms to solve the proposed models.•Experiment results on real world data show much better performance.

Spectral clustering aims to partition a data set into several groups by using the Laplacian of the graph such that data points in the same group are similar while data points in different groups are dissimilar to each other. Spectral clustering is very simple to implement and has many advantages over the traditional clustering algorithms such as k-means. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) factorizes a non-negative data matrix into a product of two non-negative (lower rank) matrices so as to achieve dimension reduction and part-based data representation. In this work, we proved that the spectral clustering under some conditions is equivalent to NMF. Unlike the previous work, we formulate the spectral clustering as a factorization of data matrix (or scaled data matrix) rather than the symmetrical factorization of the symmetrical pairwise similarity matrix as the previous study did. Under the NMF framework, where regularization can be easily incorporated into the spectral clustering, we propose several non-negative and sparse spectral clustering algorithms. Empirical studies on real world data show much better clustering accuracy of the proposed algorithms than some state-of-the-art methods such as ratio cut and normalized cut spectral clustering and non-negative Laplacian embedding.