Fast and simple multiclass data segmentation: an eigendecomposition and projection-free approach

Graph-based machine learning has seen an increased interest over the last decade with many connections to other fields of applied mathematics. Learning based on partial differential equations, such as the phase-field Allen-Cahn equation, allows efficient handling of semisupervised learning approaches on graphs. The numerical solution of the graph Allen-Cahn equation via a convexity splitting or the Merriman-Bence-Osher (MBO) scheme, albeit being a widely used approach, requires the calculation of a graph Laplacian eigendecomposition and repeated projections over the unit simplex to maintain valid partitions. The computational efficiency of those methods is hence limited by those two bottlenecks in practice, especially when dealing with large-scale instances. In order to overcome these limitations, we propose a new framework combining a novel penalty-based reformulation of the segmentation problem, which ensures valid partitions (i.e., binary solutions) for appropriate parameter choices, with an eigendecomposition and projection-free optimization scheme, which has a small per-iteration complexity (by relying primarily on sparse matrix-vector products) and guarantees good convergence properties. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets related to data segmentation in networks and images demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves comparable or better accuracy than the convexity splitting and MBO methods while being significantly faster, particularly for large-scale problems.