Graph Clustering with Embedding Propagation

In the past decade, the amount of attributed network data has skyrocketed, and the problem of identifying their underlying group structures has received significant attention. By leveraging both attribute and link information, recent state-of-the-art network clustering methods have achieved significant improvements on relatively clean datasets. However, the noisy nature of real-world attributed networks has long been overlooked, which leads to degraded performance facing missing or inaccurate attributes and links. In this work, we overcome such weaknesses by marrying the strengths of clustering and embedding on attributed networks. Specifically, we propose GRACE (GRAph Clustering with Embedding propagation), to simultaneously learn network representations and identify network clusters in an end-to-end manner. It employs deep denoise autoencoders to generate robust network embeddings from node attributes, propagates the embeddings in the network to capture node interactions, and detects clusters based on the stable state of embedding propagation. To provide more insight, we further analyze GRACE in a theoretical manner and find its underlying connections with two canonical approaches for network modeling. Extensive experiments on six real-world attributed networks demonstrate the superiority of GRACE over various baselines from the state-of-the-art. Remarkably, GRACE improves the averaged performance of the strongest baseline from 0.43 to 0.52, yielding a 21% relative improvement. Controlled experiments and case studies further verify our intuitions and demonstrate the ability of GRACE to handle noisy information in real-world attributed networks.