Clustering of High Dimensional Handwritten Data by an Improved Hypergraph Partition Method

High dimensional data clustering is a difficult task due to the curse of dimensionality. Traditional clustering methods usually fail to produce meaningful results for high dimensional data. Hypergraph partition is believed to be a promising method for dealing with this challenge. In this work, a new high dimensional clustering method called Merging Dense SubGraphs (MDSG) is proposed. A graph G is first constructed from the data by defining an adjacency relationship between the data points using Shared k Nearest Neighbors (SNN). Then a hypergraph is created from the graph G by defining the hyperedges to be all the maximal cliques in the graph. After the hypergraph is produced, an improved hypergraph partitioning method is used to produce the final clustering results. The proposed MDSG method is evaluated on several real high dimensional handwritten datasets, and the experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the traditional clustering method and other hypergraph partition methods for high dimensional handwritten data clustering.