Natural Document Clustering by Clique Percolation in Random Graphs

Document clustering techniques mostly depend on models that impose explicit and/or implicit priori assumptions as to the number, size, disjunction characteristics of clusters, and/or the probability distribution of clustered data. As a result, the clustering effects tend to be unnatural and stray away more or less from the intrinsic grouping nature among the documents in a corpus. We propose a novel graph-theoretic technique called Clique Percolation Clustering (CPC). It models clustering as a process of enumerating adjacent maximal cliques in a random graph that unveils inherent structure of the underlying data, in which we unleash the commonly practiced constraints in order to discover natural overlapping clusters. Experiments show that CPC can outperform some typical algorithms on benchmark data sets, and shed light on natural document clustering.