Numerical Methods for Spectral Clustering

Abstract: The Aviation industry is important to the European economy and development, therefore a study of the sensitivity of the European flight network is interesting. If clusters exist within the network, that could indicate possible vulnerabilities or bottlenecks, since that would represent a group of airports poorly connected to other parts of the network. In this paper a cluster analysis using spectral clustering is performed with flight data from 34 different European countries. The report also looks at how to implement the spectral clustering algorithm for large data sets. After performing the spectral clustering it appears as if the European flight network is not clustered, and thus does not appear to be sensitive.