Central Clustering of Attributed Graphs

Partitioning a data set of attributed graphs into clusters arises in different application areas of structural pattern recognition and computer vision. Despite its importance, graph clustering is currently an underdeveloped research area in machine learning due to the lack of theoretical analysis and the high computational cost of measuring structural proximities. To address the first issue, we introduce the concept of metric graph spaces that enables central (or center-based) clustering algorithms to be applied to the domain of attributed graphs. The key idea is to embed attributed graphs into Euclidean space without loss of structural information. In addressing the second issue of computational complexity, we propose a neural network solution of the K-means algorithm for structures (KMS). As a distinguishing feature to improve the computational time, the proposed algorithm classifies the data graphs according to the principle of elimination of competition where the input graph is assigned to the winning model of the competition. In experiments we investigate the behavior and performance of the neural KMS algorithm.