RCHIG: An Effective Clustering Algorithm with Ranking

In this paper, we address the problem of generating clusters for a specified type of objects, as well as ranking information for all types of objects based on these clusters in a heterogeneous information graph. A novel clustering framework called RCHIG is proposed that directly generates clusters integrated with ranking. Based on initial K clusters, ranking is applied separately, which serves as a good measure for each cluster. Then, we use a mixture model to decompose each object into a K-dimensional vector, where each dimension is a component coefficient with respect to a cluster, which is measured by rank distribution. Objects then are reassigned to the nearest cluster under the new measure space to improve clustering. As a result, quality of clustering and ranking are mutually enhanced, which means that the clusters are getting more accurate and the ranking is getting more meaningful. Such a progressive refinement process iterates until little change can be made. Our experiment results show that RCHIG can generate more accurate clusters and in a more efficient way than the state-of-the-art link-based clustering methods. Moreover, the clustering results with ranks can provide more informative views of data compared with traditional clustering.