Clustering by weighted cuts in directed graphs

In this paper we formulate spectral clustering in directed graphs as an optimization problem, the objective being a weighted cut in the directed graph. This objective extends several popular criteria like the normalized cut and the averaged cut to asymmetric affinity data. We show that this problem can be relaxed to a Rayleigh quotient problem for a symmetric matrix obtained from the original affinities and therefore a large body of the results and algorithms developed for spectral clustering of symmetric data immediately extends to asymmetric cuts.