  Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) produces data about activity
inside the brain, from which spatial maps can be extracted by independent
component analysis (ICA). In datasets, there are n spatial maps that contain p
voxels. The number of voxels is very high compared to the number of analyzed
spatial maps. Clustering of the spatial maps is usually based on correlation
matrices. This usually works well, although such a similarity matrix inherently
can explain only a certain amount of the total variance contained in the
high-dimensional data where n is relatively small but p is large. For
high-dimensional space, it is reasonable to perform dimensionality reduction
before clustering. In this research, we used the recently developed diffusion
map for dimensionality reduction in conjunction with spectral clustering. This
research revealed that the diffusion map based clustering worked as well as the
more traditional methods, and produced more compact clusters when needed.
