Soft document clustering using a novel graph covering approach

BACKGROUND: In text mining, document clustering describes the efforts to assign unstructured documents to clusters, which in turn usually refer to topics. Clustering is widely used in science for data retrieval and organisation. RESULTS: In this paper we present and discuss a novel graph-theoretical approach for document clustering and its application on a real-world data set. We will show that the well-known graph partition to stable sets or cliques can be generalized to pseudostable sets or pseudocliques. This allows to perform a soft clustering as well as a hard clustering. The software is freely available on GitHub. CONCLUSIONS: The presented integer linear programming as well as the greedy approach for this [Formula: see text] -complete problem lead to valuable results on random instances and some real-world data for different similarity measures. We could show that PS-Document Clustering is a remarkable approach to document clustering and opens the complete toolbox of graph theory to this field. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13040-018-0172-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.