50 research outputs found
A lower bound for metric 1-median selection
Consider the problem of finding a point in an n-point metric space with the
minimum average distance to all points. We show that this problem has no
deterministic -query -approximation algorithms
Approximation and Streaming Algorithms for Projective Clustering via Random Projections
Let be a set of points in . In the projective
clustering problem, given and norm , we have to
compute a set of -dimensional flats such that is minimized; here
represents the (Euclidean) distance of to the closest flat in
. We let denote the minimal value and interpret
to be . When and
and , the problem corresponds to the -median, -mean and the
-center clustering problems respectively.
For every , and , we show that the
orthogonal projection of onto a randomly chosen flat of dimension
will -approximate
. This result combines the concepts of geometric coresets and
subspace embeddings based on the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma. As a consequence,
an orthogonal projection of to an dimensional randomly chosen subspace
-approximates projective clusterings for every and
simultaneously. Note that the dimension of this subspace is independent of the
number of clusters~.
Using this dimension reduction result, we obtain new approximation and
streaming algorithms for projective clustering problems. For example, given a
stream of points, we show how to compute an -approximate
projective clustering for every and simultaneously using only
space. Compared to
standard streaming algorithms with space requirement, our approach
is a significant improvement when the number of input points and their
dimensions are of the same order of magnitude.Comment: Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2015
Scalable k-Means Clustering via Lightweight Coresets
Coresets are compact representations of data sets such that models trained on
a coreset are provably competitive with models trained on the full data set. As
such, they have been successfully used to scale up clustering models to massive
data sets. While existing approaches generally only allow for multiplicative
approximation errors, we propose a novel notion of lightweight coresets that
allows for both multiplicative and additive errors. We provide a single
algorithm to construct lightweight coresets for k-means clustering as well as
soft and hard Bregman clustering. The algorithm is substantially faster than
existing constructions, embarrassingly parallel, and the resulting coresets are
smaller. We further show that the proposed approach naturally generalizes to
statistical k-means clustering and that, compared to existing results, it can
be used to compute smaller summaries for empirical risk minimization. In
extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms
existing data summarization strategies in practice.Comment: To appear in the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on
Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD