The latest research progress on spectral clustering

Spectral clustering is a clustering method based on algebraic graph theory. It has aroused extensive attention of academia in recent years, due to its solid theoretical foundation, as well as the good performance of clustering. This paper introduces the basic concepts of graph theory and reviews main matrix representations of the graph, then compares the objective functions of typical graph cut methods and explores the nature of spectral clustering algorithm. We also summarize the latest research achievements of spectral clustering and discuss several key issues in spectral clustering, such as how to construct similarity matrix and Laplacian matrix, how to select eigenvectors, how to determine cluster number, and the applications of spectral clustering. At last, we propose several valuable research directions in light of the deficiencies of spectral clustering algorithms.