Evolutionary Spectral Co-Clustering

Co-clustering is the problem of deriving submatrices from the larger data matrix by simultaneously clustering rows and columns of the data matrix. Traditional co-clustering techniques are inapplicable to problems where the relationship between the instances (rows) and features (columns) evolve over time. Not only is it important for the clustering algorithm to adapt to the recent changes in the evolving data, but it also needs to take the historical relationship between the instances and features into consideration. We present ESCC, a general framework for evolutionary spectral co-clustering. We are able to efficiently co-cluster evolving data by incorporation of historical clustering results. Under the proposed framework, we present two approaches, Respect To the Current (RTC), and Respect To Historical (RTH). The two approaches differ in the way the historical cost is computed. In RTC, the present clustering quality is of most importance and historical cost is calculated with only one previous time-step. RTH, on the other hand, attempts to keep instances and features tied to the same clusters between time-steps. Extensive experiments performed on synthetic and real world data, demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.