8,066 research outputs found
The Bane of Low-Dimensionality Clustering
In this paper, we give a conditional lower bound of on
running time for the classic k-median and k-means clustering objectives (where
n is the size of the input), even in low-dimensional Euclidean space of
dimension four, assuming the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH). We also
consider k-median (and k-means) with penalties where each point need not be
assigned to a center, in which case it must pay a penalty, and extend our lower
bound to at least three-dimensional Euclidean space.
This stands in stark contrast to many other geometric problems such as the
traveling salesman problem, or computing an independent set of unit spheres.
While these problems benefit from the so-called (limited) blessing of
dimensionality, as they can be solved in time or
in d dimensions, our work shows that widely-used clustering
objectives have a lower bound of , even in dimension four.
We complete the picture by considering the two-dimensional case: we show that
there is no algorithm that solves the penalized version in time less than
, and provide a matching upper bound of .
The main tool we use to establish these lower bounds is the placement of
points on the moment curve, which takes its inspiration from constructions of
point sets yielding Delaunay complexes of high complexity
Approximate Clustering via Metric Partitioning
In this paper we consider two metric covering/clustering problems -
\textit{Minimum Cost Covering Problem} (MCC) and -clustering. In the MCC
problem, we are given two point sets (clients) and (servers), and a
metric on . We would like to cover the clients by balls centered at
the servers. The objective function to minimize is the sum of the -th
power of the radii of the balls. Here is a parameter of the
problem (but not of a problem instance). MCC is closely related to the
-clustering problem. The main difference between -clustering and MCC is
that in -clustering one needs to select balls to cover the clients.
For any \eps > 0, we describe quasi-polynomial time (1 + \eps)
approximation algorithms for both of the problems. However, in case of
-clustering the algorithm uses (1 + \eps)k balls. Prior to our work, a
and a approximation were achieved by
polynomial-time algorithms for MCC and -clustering, respectively, where is an absolute constant. These two problems are thus interesting examples of
metric covering/clustering problems that admit (1 + \eps)-approximation
(using (1+\eps)k balls in case of -clustering), if one is willing to
settle for quasi-polynomial time. In contrast, for the variant of MCC where
is part of the input, we show under standard assumptions that no
polynomial time algorithm can achieve an approximation factor better than
for .Comment: 19 page
Minimum-Cost Coverage of Point Sets by Disks
We consider a class of geometric facility location problems in which the goal
is to determine a set X of disks given by their centers (t_j) and radii (r_j)
that cover a given set of demand points Y in the plane at the smallest possible
cost. We consider cost functions of the form sum_j f(r_j), where f(r)=r^alpha
is the cost of transmission to radius r. Special cases arise for alpha=1 (sum
of radii) and alpha=2 (total area); power consumption models in wireless
network design often use an exponent alpha>2. Different scenarios arise
according to possible restrictions on the transmission centers t_j, which may
be constrained to belong to a given discrete set or to lie on a line, etc. We
obtain several new results, including (a) exact and approximation algorithms
for selecting transmission points t_j on a given line in order to cover demand
points Y in the plane; (b) approximation algorithms (and an algebraic
intractability result) for selecting an optimal line on which to place
transmission points to cover Y; (c) a proof of NP-hardness for a discrete set
of transmission points in the plane and any fixed alpha>1; and (d) a
polynomial-time approximation scheme for the problem of computing a minimum
cost covering tour (MCCT), in which the total cost is a linear combination of
the transmission cost for the set of disks and the length of a tour/path that
connects the centers of the disks.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, Latex, to appear in ACM Symposium on
Computational Geometry 200
SANNS: Scaling Up Secure Approximate k-Nearest Neighbors Search
The -Nearest Neighbor Search (-NNS) is the backbone of several
cloud-based services such as recommender systems, face recognition, and
database search on text and images. In these services, the client sends the
query to the cloud server and receives the response in which case the query and
response are revealed to the service provider. Such data disclosures are
unacceptable in several scenarios due to the sensitivity of data and/or privacy
laws.
In this paper, we introduce SANNS, a system for secure -NNS that keeps
client's query and the search result confidential. SANNS comprises two
protocols: an optimized linear scan and a protocol based on a novel sublinear
time clustering-based algorithm. We prove the security of both protocols in the
standard semi-honest model. The protocols are built upon several
state-of-the-art cryptographic primitives such as lattice-based additively
homomorphic encryption, distributed oblivious RAM, and garbled circuits. We
provide several contributions to each of these primitives which are applicable
to other secure computation tasks. Both of our protocols rely on a new circuit
for the approximate top- selection from numbers that is built from comparators.
We have implemented our proposed system and performed extensive experimental
results on four datasets in two different computation environments,
demonstrating more than faster response time compared to
optimally implemented protocols from the prior work. Moreover, SANNS is the
first work that scales to the database of 10 million entries, pushing the limit
by more than two orders of magnitude.Comment: 18 pages, to appear at USENIX Security Symposium 202
Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning
We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph
partitioning together with applications and future research directions
- …