Clustering Mixed-Attribute Data using Random Walk

Most clustering algorithms rely in some fundamental way on a measure of either similarity or distance — either between objects themselves, or between objects and cluster centroids. When the dataset contains mixed attributes, defining a suitable measure can be problematic. This paper presents a general graph-based method for clustering mixed-attribute datasets that does not require any explicit measure of similarity or distance. Empirical results on a range of well-known datasets using a range of evaluation measures show that the method achieves performance competitive with traditional clustering algorithms that require explicit calculation of distance or similarity, as well as with more recently proposed clustering algorithms based on matrix factorization.