17 research outputs found
Projected Power Iteration for Network Alignment
The network alignment problem asks for the best correspondence between two
given graphs, so that the largest possible number of edges are matched. This
problem appears in many scientific problems (like the study of protein-protein
interactions) and it is very closely related to the quadratic assignment
problem which has graph isomorphism, traveling salesman and minimum bisection
problems as particular cases. The graph matching problem is NP-hard in general.
However, under some restrictive models for the graphs, algorithms can
approximate the alignment efficiently. In that spirit the recent work by Feizi
and collaborators introduce EigenAlign, a fast spectral method with convergence
guarantees for Erd\H{o}s-Reny\'i graphs. In this work we propose the algorithm
Projected Power Alignment, which is a projected power iteration version of
EigenAlign. We numerically show it improves the recovery rates of EigenAlign
and we describe the theory that may be used to provide performance guarantees
for Projected Power Alignment.Comment: 8 page
Exact Clustering of Weighted Graphs via Semidefinite Programming
As a model problem for clustering, we consider the densest k-disjoint-clique
problem of partitioning a weighted complete graph into k disjoint subgraphs
such that the sum of the densities of these subgraphs is maximized. We
establish that such subgraphs can be recovered from the solution of a
particular semidefinite relaxation with high probability if the input graph is
sampled from a distribution of clusterable graphs. Specifically, the
semidefinite relaxation is exact if the graph consists of k large disjoint
subgraphs, corresponding to clusters, with weight concentrated within these
subgraphs, plus a moderate number of outliers. Further, we establish that if
noise is weakly obscuring these clusters, i.e, the between-cluster edges are
assigned very small weights, then we can recover significantly smaller
clusters. For example, we show that in approximately sparse graphs, where the
between-cluster weights tend to zero as the size n of the graph tends to
infinity, we can recover clusters of size polylogarithmic in n. Empirical
evidence from numerical simulations is also provided to support these
theoretical phase transitions to perfect recovery of the cluster structure
Relax, no need to round: integrality of clustering formulations
We study exact recovery conditions for convex relaxations of point cloud
clustering problems, focusing on two of the most common optimization problems
for unsupervised clustering: -means and -median clustering. Motivations
for focusing on convex relaxations are: (a) they come with a certificate of
optimality, and (b) they are generic tools which are relatively parameter-free,
not tailored to specific assumptions over the input. More precisely, we
consider the distributional setting where there are clusters in
and data from each cluster consists of points sampled from a
symmetric distribution within a ball of unit radius. We ask: what is the
minimal separation distance between cluster centers needed for convex
relaxations to exactly recover these clusters as the optimal integral
solution? For the -median linear programming relaxation we show a tight
bound: exact recovery is obtained given arbitrarily small pairwise separation
between the balls. In other words, the pairwise center
separation is . Under the same distributional model, the
-means LP relaxation fails to recover such clusters at separation as large
as . Yet, if we enforce PSD constraints on the -means LP, we get
exact cluster recovery at center separation .
In contrast, common heuristics such as Lloyd's algorithm (a.k.a. the -means
algorithm) can fail to recover clusters in this setting; even with arbitrarily
large cluster separation, k-means++ with overseeding by any constant factor
fails with high probability at exact cluster recovery. To complement the
theoretical analysis, we provide an experimental study of the recovery
guarantees for these various methods, and discuss several open problems which
these experiments suggest.Comment: 30 pages, ITCS 201
Recommended from our members
Applied Harmonic Analysis and Sparse Approximation
Efficiently analyzing functions, in particular multivariate functions, is a key problem in applied mathematics. The area of applied harmonic analysis has a significant impact on this problem by providing methodologies both for theoretical questions and for a wide range of applications in technology and science, such as image processing. Approximation theory, in particular the branch of the theory of sparse approximations, is closely intertwined with this area with a lot of recent exciting developments in the intersection of both. Research topics typically also involve related areas such as convex optimization, probability theory, and Banach space geometry. The workshop was the continuation of a first event in 2012 and intended to bring together world leading experts in these areas, to report on recent developments, and to foster new developments and collaborations
Size matters: cardinality-constrained clustering and outlier detection via conic optimization
Plain vanilla K-means clustering has proven to be successful in practice, yet it suffers from outlier sensitivity and may produce highly unbalanced clusters. To mitigate both shortcomings, we formulate a joint outlier detection and clustering problem, which assigns a prescribed number of datapoints to an auxiliary outlier cluster and performs cardinality-constrainedK-means clustering on the residual dataset, treating the cluster cardinalities as a given input. We cast this problem as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) that admits tractable semidefinite and linear programming relaxations. We propose deterministic rounding schemes thattransform the relaxed solutions to feasible solutions for the MILP. We also prove that these solutions areoptimal in the MILP if a cluster separation condition holds