Spectral Clustering

Spectral Clustering is a graph-based unsupervised learning algorithm, formalized by Ng, Jordan, and Weiss in 2002, that maps data points into a low-dimensional eigenspace derived from the similarity graph's Laplacian before applying k-means. This spectral embedding makes it possible to recover clusters of arbitrary shape — rings, crescents, interleaved spirals — that Euclidean distance-based methods consistently fail to separate.