On the Advantage of Overlapping Clusters for Minimizing Conductance
Graph clustering is an important problem with applications to bioinformatics, community discovery in social networks, distributed computing, and more. While most of the research in this area has focused on clustering using disjoint clusters, many real datasets have inherently overlapping clusters. We compare overlapping and non-overlapping clusterings in graphs in the context of minimizing their conductance. It is known that allowing clusters to overlap gives better results in practice. We prove that overlapping clustering may be significantly better than non-overlapping clustering with respect to conductance, even in a theoretical setting.
clustering conductance graphs social networks approximation