Experiments on Density-Constrained Graph Clustering

TL;DR

This paper evaluates greedy heuristics for density-constrained graph clustering, showing local movement strategies outperform merging and identifying effective measure combinations for hidden cluster detection.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive experimental comparison of greedy clustering heuristics based on cut objectives and density constraints, highlighting the superiority of local movement strategies.

Findings

Local movement heuristics outperform merging strategies.

The proposed heuristics outperform existing algorithms in objective quality.

Certain measure combinations effectively identify hidden clusters in synthetic graphs.

Abstract

Clustering a graph means identifying internally dense subgraphs which are only sparsely interconnected. Formalizations of this notion lead to measures that quantify the quality of a clustering and to algorithms that actually find clusterings. Since, most generally, corresponding optimization problems are hard, heuristic clustering algorithms are used in practice, or other approaches which are not based on an objective function. In this work we conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of the qualitative behavior of greedy bottom-up heuristics driven by cut-based objectives and constrained by intracluster density, using both real-world data and artificial instances. Our study documents that a greedy strategy based on local movement is superior to one based on merging. We further reveal that the former approach generally outperforms alternative setups and reference algorithms from the literature in terms of its own objective, while a modularity-based algorithm competes surprisingly well. Finally, we exhibit which combinations of cut-based inter- and intracluster measures are suitable for identifying a hidden reference clustering in synthetic random graphs.