Efficient Hypergraph Clustering

Data clustering is an essential problem in data mining, machine learning and computer vision. In this paper we present a novel method for the hypergraph clustering problem, in which second or higher order affinities between sets of data points are considered. Our algorithm has important theoretical properties, such as convergence and satisfaction of first order necessary optimality conditions. It is based on an efficient iterative procedure, which by updating the cluster membership of all points in parallel, is able to achieve state of the art results in very few steps. We outperform current hypergraph clustering methods especially in terms of computational speed, but also in terms of accuracy. Moreover, we show that our method could be successfully applied both to higher-order assignment problems and to image segmentation.