High-Order Local Clustering on Hypergraphs

Graphs are a commonly used model in data mining to represent complex relationships, with nodes representing entities and edges representing relationships. However, graphs have limitations in modeling high-order relationships. In contrast, hypergraphs offer a more versatile representation, allowing edges to join any number of nodes. This capability empowers hypergraphs to model multiple relationships and capture high-order information present in real-world applications. We focus on the problem of local clustering in hypergraphs, which computes a cluster near a given seed node. Although extensively explored in the context of graphs, this problem has received less attention for hypergraphs. Current methods often directly extend graph-based local clustering to hypergraphs, overlooking their inherent high-order features and resulting in low-quality local clusters. To address this, we propose an effective hypergraph local clustering model. This model introduces a novel conductance measurement that leverages the high-order properties of hypergraphs to assess cluster quality. Based on this new definition of hypergraph conductance, we propose a greedy algorithm to find local clusters in real time. Experimental evaluations and case studies on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.