Vector quantization based approximate spectral clustering of large datasets
Spectral partitioning, recently popular for unsupervised clustering, is infeasible for large datasets due to its computational complexity and memory requirement. Therefore, approximate spectral clustering of data representatives (selected by various sampling methods) was used. Alternatively, we propose to use neural networks (self-organizing maps and neural gas), which are shown successful in quantization with small distortion, as preliminary sampling for approximate spectral clustering (ASC). We show that they usually outperform k-means sampling (which was shown superior to various sampling methods), in terms of clustering accuracy obtained by ASC. More importantly, for quantization based ASC, we introduce a local density-based similarity measure  constructed without any user-set parameter  which achieves accuracies superior to the accuracies of commonly used distance based similarity.
vector quantization spectral clustering large datasets self-organizing maps neural gas conn similarity connectivity