Robust Spectral Clustering via Low-Rank Sample Representation

Abstract

Traditional clustering methods neglect the data quality and perform clustering directly on the original data. Therefore, their performance can easily deteriorate since real-world data would usually contain noisy data samples in high-dimensional space. In order to resolve the previously mentioned problem, a new method is proposed, which builds on the approach of low-rank representation. The proposed approach first learns a low-rank coefficient matrix from data by exploiting the data’s self-expressiveness property. Then, a regularization term is introduced to ensure that the representation coefficient of two samples, which are similar in original high-dimensional space, is close to maintaining the samples’ neighborhood structure in the low-dimensional space. As a result, the proposed method obtains a clustering structure directly through the low-rank coefficient matrix to guarantee optimal clustering performance. A wide range of experiments shows that the proposed method is superior to compared state-of-the-art methods.