Adaptive Graph Convolution Using Heat Kernel for Attributed Graph Clustering

Attributed graphs contain a lot of node features and structural relationships, and how to utilize their inherent information sufficiently to improve graph clustering performance has attracted much attention. Although existing advanced methods exploit graph convolution to capture the global structure of an attributed graph and achieve obvious improvements for clustering results, they cannot determine the optimal neighborhood that reflects the relevant information of connected nodes in a graph. To address this limitation, we propose a novel adaptive graph convolution using a heat kernel model for attributed graph clustering (AGCHK), which exploits the similarity among nodes under heat diffusion to flexibly restrict the neighborhood of the center node and enforce the graph smoothness. Additionally, we take the Davies–Bouldin index (DBI) instead of the intra-cluster distance individually as the selection criterion to adaptively determine the order of graph convolution. The clustering results of AGCHK on three benchmark datasets—Cora, Citeseer, and Pubmed—are all more than 1% higher than the current advanced model AGC, and 12% on the Wiki dataset especially, which obtains a state-of-the-art result in the task of attributed graph clustering.