  Spectral clustering methods which are frequently used in clustering and
community detection applications are sensitive to the specific graph
constructions particularly when imbalanced clusters are present. We show that
ratio cut (RCut) or normalized cut (NCut) objectives are not tailored to
imbalanced cluster sizes since they tend to emphasize cut sizes over cut
values. We propose a graph partitioning problem that seeks minimum cut
partitions under minimum size constraints on partitions to deal with imbalanced
cluster sizes. Our approach parameterizes a family of graphs by adaptively
modulating node degrees on a fixed node set, yielding a set of parameter
dependent cuts reflecting varying levels of imbalance. The solution to our
problem is then obtained by optimizing over these parameters. We present
rigorous limit cut analysis results to justify our approach and demonstrate the
superiority of our method through experiments on synthetic and real datasets
for data clustering, semi-supervised learning and community detection.
