Fast Algorithm for Affinity Propagation

Abstract

Affinity Propagation is a state-of-the-art clustering method recently proposed by Frey and Dueck. It has been successfully applied to broad areas of computer science research because it has much better clustering performance than traditional clustering methods such as k-means. In order to obtain high quality sets of clusters, the original Affinity Propagation algorithm iteratively exchanges real-valued messages between all pairs of data points until convergence. However, this algorithm does not scale for large datasets because it requires quadratic CPU time in the number of data points to compute the messages. This paper proposes an efficient Affinity Propagation algorithm that guarantees the same clustering result as the original algorithm after convergence. The heart of our approach is (1) to prune unnecessary message exchanges in the iterations and (2) to compute the convergence values of pruned messages after the iterations to determine clusters. Experimental evaluations on several different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.