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Document clustering

Document clustering is an unsupervised machine learning and natural language processing technique that automatically organizes a collection of text documents into distinct groups based on their content similarity, without relying on predefined category labels. To perform this grouping, documents are typically converted into numerical representations, such as high-dimensional vectors or term-document matrices based on vocabulary frequency, term weighting schemes, or latent semantic features. Various algorithms, including partitioning methods, hierarchical clustering, and matrix factorization, analyze these mathematical representations to discover underlying thematic patterns. By maximizing the similarity of documents within the same cluster while minimizing the similarity across different clusters, document clustering facilitates large-scale text organization, information retrieval, automated topic discovery, and text mining.

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Concept Decompositions for Large Sparse Text Data Using Clustering

Concept Decompositions for Large Sparse Text Data Using Clustering

I. Dhillon, D. Modha

OrganizationsIBMUniversity of Texas at Austin

Why you should read this

Demonstrates that spherical k-means clustering yields sparse, localized concept decompositions that rival traditional singular value decomposition in matrix approximation accuracy while providing superior interpretability for high-dimensional text data.

Unlabeled document collections are becoming increasingly common and available; mining such data sets represents a major contemporary challenge. Using words as features, text documents are often represented as high-dimensional and sparse vectors–a few thousand dimensions and a sparsity of 95 to 99% is typical. In this paper, we study a certain spherical k-means algorithm for clustering such document vectors. The algorithm outputs k disjoint clusters each with a concept vector that is the centroid of the cluster normalized to have unit Euclidean norm. As our first contribution, we empirically demonstrate that, owing to the high-dimensionality and sparsity of the text data, the clusters produced by the algorithm have a certain “fractal-like” and “self-similar” behavior. As our second contribution, we introduce concept decompositions to approximate the matrix of document vectors; these decompositions are obtained by taking the least-squares approximation onto the linear subspace spanned by all the concept vectors. We empirically establish that the approximation errors of the concept decompositions are close to the best possible, namely, to truncated singular value decompositions. As our third contribution, we show that the concept vectors are localized in the word space, are sparse, and tend towards orthonormality. In contrast, the singular vectors are global in the word space and are dense. Nonetheless, we observe the surprising fact that the linear subspaces spanned by the concept vectors and the leading singular vectors are quite close in the sense of small principal angles between them. In conclusion, the concept vectors produced by the spherical k- means algorithm constitute a powerful sparse and localized “basis” for text data sets.

Added

2026-09-24