Soft kernel spectral clustering

In this paper we propose an algorithm for soft (or fuzzy) clustering. In soft clustering each point is not assigned to a single cluster (like in hard clustering), but it can belong to every cluster with a different degree of membership. Generally speaking, this property is desirable in order to improve the interpretability of the results. Our starting point is a state-of-the art technique called kernel spectral clustering (KSC). Instead of using the hard assignment method present therein, we suggest a fuzzy assignment based on the cosine distance from the cluster prototypes. We then call the new method soft kernel spectral clustering (SKSC). We also introduce a related model selection technique, called average membership strength criterion, which solves the drawbacks of the previously proposed method (namely balanced linefit). We apply the new algorithm to synthetic and real datasets, for image segmentation and community detection on networks. We show that in many cases SKSC outperforms KSC.