What is spectral clustering and how is it related to dimensionality reduction?

Updated May 16, 2026

Short answer

Spectral clustering uses eigenvectors of a graph Laplacian as a low-dimensional embedding.

Deep explanation

It constructs a similarity graph, computes the Laplacian matrix, and uses its eigenvectors to embed data into a lower-dimensional space where clustering becomes easier. This embedding step is effectively a dimensionality reduction process.

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