Two-pronged feature reduction in spectral clustering with optimized landmark selection

Spectral clustering is widely employed for clustering data points, particularly for non-linear and non-convex structures in high-dimensional spaces. However, it faces challenges due to the high computational cost of eigen decomposition operations and the performance limitations with high-dimensional data. In this paper, we introduce BVA_LSC, a novel spectral clustering algorithm designed to address these challenges. Firstly, we incorporate an advanced feature reduction stage utilizing Barnes-Hut t-SNE and a deep Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to efficiently reduce the dimensionality of the data, thereby accelerating eigen decomposition. Secondly, we propose an adaptive landmark selection strategy that combines the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) with a novel objective function and K-harmonic means clustering. This strategy dynamically determines an optimal number of landmarks, enhancing the representativeness of the data and reducing the size of the similarity matrix. We assess the performance of our algorithm on various standard datasets, demonstrating its superiority over state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and efficiency.