Submodular Hypergraphs: p-Laplacians, Cheeger Inequalities and Spectral Clustering

Abstract: We introduce submodular hypergraphs, a family of hypergraphs that have different submodular weights associated with different cuts of hyperedges. Submodular hypergraphs arise in clustering applications in which higher-order structures carry relevant information. For such hypergraphs, we define the notion of p-Laplacians and derive corresponding nodal domain theorems and k-way Cheeger inequalities. We conclude with the description of algorithms for computing the spectra of 1- and 2-Laplacians that constitute the basis of new spectral hypergraph clustering methods.