Response To Comment On "Clustering By Passing Messages Between Data Points"

Affinity propagation (AP) can be viewed as a generalization of the vertex substitution heuristic (VSH), whereby probabilistic exemplar substitutions are performed concurrently. Although results on small data sets (≤900 points) demonstrate that VSH is competitive with AP, we found VSH to be prohibitively slow for moderate-to-large problems, whereas AP was much faster and could achieve lower error.