A similarity-based soft clustering algorithm for documents

Document clustering is an important tool for applications such as Web search engines. Clustering documents enables the user to have a good overall view of the information contained in the documents that he has. However, existing algorithms suffer from various aspects, hard clustering algorithms (where each document belongs to exactly one cluster) cannot detect the multiple themes of a document, while soft clustering algorithms (where each document can belong to multiple clusters) are usually inefficient. We propose SISC (similarity-based soft clustering), an efficient soft clustering algorithm based on a given similarity measure. SISC requires only a similarity measure for clustering and uses randomization to help make the clustering efficient. Comparison with existing hard clustering algorithms like K-means and its variants shows that SISC is both effective and efficient.