A General Framework for Fast Co-clustering on Large Datasets Using Matrix Decomposition.

Simultaneously clustering columns and rows (co-clustering) of large data matrix is an important problem with wide applications, such as document mining, microarray analysis, and recommendation systems. Several co-clustering algorithms have been shown effective in discovering hidden clustering structures in the data matrix. For a data matrix of m rows and n columns, the time complexity of these methods is usually in the order of m × n (if not higher). This limits their applicability to data matrices involving a large number of columns and rows. Moreover, an implicit assumption made by existing co-clustering methods is that the whole data matrix needs to be held in the main memory. In this paper, we propose a general framework, CRD, for co-clustering large datasets utilizing recently developed sampling-based matrix decomposition methods. The time complexity of our approach is linear in m and n. And it does not require the whole data matrix be in the main memory. Extensive experimental results on synthetic and several well-known real-life datasets show that CRD achieves competitive accuracy to existing co-clustering methods but with much less computational cost.