Automated facial expression detection problem pose two primary challenges that include variations in expression and facial occlusions (glasses, beard, mustache or face covers). In this paper we introduce a novel automated patch creation technique that masks a particular region of interest in the face, followed by Eigen-value decomposition of the patched faces and generation of Isomaps to detect underlying clustering patterns among faces. The proposed masked Eigen-face based Isomap clustering technique achieves 75% sensitivity and 66-73% accuracy in classification of faces with occlusions and smiling faces in around 1 second per image. Also, betweenness centrality, Eigen centrality and maximum information flow can be used as network-based measures to identify the most significant training faces for expression classification tasks. The proposed method can be used in combination with feature-based expression classification methods in large data sets for improving expression classification accuracies.