  Spectral clustering refers to a family of unsupervised learning algorithms
that compute a spectral embedding of the original data based on the
eigenvectors of a similarity graph. This non-linear transformation of the data
is both the key of these algorithms' success and their Achilles heel: forming a
graph and computing its dominant eigenvectors can indeed be computationally
prohibitive when dealing with more that a few tens of thousands of points. In
this paper, we review the principal research efforts aiming to reduce this
computational cost. We focus on methods that come with a theoretical control on
the clustering performance and incorporate some form of sampling in their
operation. Such methods abound in the machine learning, numerical linear
algebra, and graph signal processing literature and, amongst others, include
Nystr\"om-approximation, landmarks, coarsening, coresets, and compressive
spectral clustering. We present the approximation guarantees available for each
and discuss practical merits and limitations. Surprisingly, despite the breadth
of the literature explored, we conclude that there is still a gap between
theory and practice: the most scalable methods are only intuitively motivated
or loosely controlled, whereas those that come with end-to-end guarantees rely
on strong assumptions or enable a limited gain of computation time.
