52,305 research outputs found
Approximation algorithms for stochastic clustering
We consider stochastic settings for clustering, and develop provably-good
approximation algorithms for a number of these notions. These algorithms yield
better approximation ratios compared to the usual deterministic clustering
setting. Additionally, they offer a number of advantages including clustering
which is fairer and has better long-term behavior for each user. In particular,
they ensure that *every user* is guaranteed to get good service (on average).
We also complement some of these with impossibility results
Robust hierarchical k-center clustering
One of the most popular and widely used methods for data clustering is hierarchical clustering. This clustering technique has proved useful to reveal interesting structure in the data in several applications ranging from computational biology to computer vision. Robustness is an important feature of a clustering technique if we require the clustering to be stable against small perturbations in the input data. In most applications, getting a clustering output that is robust against adversarial outliers or stochastic noise is a necessary condition for the applicability and effectiveness of the clustering technique. This is even more critical in hierarchical clustering where a small change at the bottom of the hierarchy may propagate all the way through to the top. Despite all the previous work [2, 3, 6, 8], our theoretical understanding of robust hierarchical clustering is still limited and several hierarchical clustering algorithms are not known to satisfy such robustness properties. In this paper, we study the limits of robust hierarchical k-center clustering by introducing the concept of universal hierarchical clustering and provide (almost) tight lower and upper bounds for the robust hierarchical k-center clustering problem with outliers and variants of the stochastic clustering problem. Most importantly we present a constant-factor approximation for optimal hierarchical k-center with at most z outliers using a universal set of at most O(z2) set of outliers and show that this result is tight. Moreover we show the necessity of using a universal set of outliers in order to compute an approximately optimal hierarchical k-center with a diffierent set of outliers for each k
Efficient Semidefinite Spectral Clustering via Lagrange Duality
We propose an efficient approach to semidefinite spectral clustering (SSC),
which addresses the Frobenius normalization with the positive semidefinite
(p.s.d.) constraint for spectral clustering. Compared with the original
Frobenius norm approximation based algorithm, the proposed algorithm can more
accurately find the closest doubly stochastic approximation to the affinity
matrix by considering the p.s.d. constraint. In this paper, SSC is formulated
as a semidefinite programming (SDP) problem. In order to solve the high
computational complexity of SDP, we present a dual algorithm based on the
Lagrange dual formalization. Two versions of the proposed algorithm are
proffered: one with less memory usage and the other with faster convergence
rate. The proposed algorithm has much lower time complexity than that of the
standard interior-point based SDP solvers. Experimental results on both UCI
data sets and real-world image data sets demonstrate that 1) compared with the
state-of-the-art spectral clustering methods, the proposed algorithm achieves
better clustering performance; and 2) our algorithm is much more efficient and
can solve larger-scale SSC problems than those standard interior-point SDP
solvers.Comment: 13 page
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