Joint cluster analysis of attribute data and relationship data

Entities can be described by two principal types of data: attribute data and relationship data. Attribute data describe intrinsic characteristics of entities whereas relationship data represent extrinsic influences among entities. While attribute data have been the major data source in data analysis, more and more relationship data are becoming available. To name a few, acquaintance and collaboration networks are examples of social networks, and neural and metabolic networks are examples of biological networks. Consequently, network analysis [42, 52, 53] has been gaining popularity in the study of marketing, community identification, epidemiology, molecular biology and so on.