DB-CSC: A Density-Based Approach for Subspace Clustering in Graphs with Feature Vectors

Abstract

Data sources representing attribute information in combination with network information are widely available in today’s applications. To realize the full potential for knowledge extraction, mining techniques like clustering should consider both information types simultaneously. Recent clustering approaches combine subspace clustering with dense subgraph mining to identify groups of objects that are similar in subsets of their attributes as well as densely connected within the network. While those approaches successfully circumvent the problem of full-space clustering, their limited cluster definitions are restricted to clusters of certain shapes. In this work, we introduce a density-based cluster definition taking the attribute similarity in subspaces and the graph density into account. This novel cluster model enables us to detect clusters of arbitrary shape and size. We avoid redundancy in the result by selecting only the most interesting non-redundant clusters. Based on this model, we introduce the clustering algorithm DB-CSC. In thorough experiments we demonstrate the strength of DB-CSC in comparison to related approaches.