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Spectral clustering is a powerful tool for exploratory data analysis. Many existing spectral clustering algorithms typically measure the similarity by using a Gaussian kernel function or an undirected k‐nearest neighbor (kNN) graph, which cannot reveal the real clusters when the data are not well separated. In this paper, to improve the spectral clustering, we consider a robust similarity measure based on the shared nearest neighbors in a directed kNN graph. We propose two novel algorithms for spectral clustering: one based on the number of shared nearest neighbors, and one based on their closeness. The proposed algorithms are able to explore the underlying similarity relationships between data points, and are robust to datasets that are not well separated. Moreover, the proposed algorithms have only one parameter, k. We evaluated the proposed algorithms using synthetic and real‐world datasets. The …