Tight FPT Approximations for k-Median and k-Means

We investigate the fine-grained complexity of approximating the classical k-Median/k-Means clustering problems in general metric spaces. We show how to improve the approximation factors to (1+2/e+epsilon) and (1+8/e+epsilon) respectively, using algorithms that run in fixed-parameter time. Moreover, we show that we cannot do better in FPT time, modulo recent complexity-theoretic conjectures

On Coresets for Fair Clustering in Metric and Euclidean Spaces and Their Applications

Fair clustering is a constrained clustering problem where we need to partition a set of colored points. The fraction of points of each color in every cluster should be more or less equal to the fraction of points of this color in the dataset. The problem was recently introduced by Chierichetti et al. (2017) [1]. We propose a new construction of coresets for fair clustering for Euclidean and general metrics based on random sampling. For the Euclidean space Rd, we provide the first coreset whose size does not depend exponentially on the dimension d. The question of whether such constructions exist was asked by Schmidt et al. (2019) [2]and Huang et al. (2019) [5]. For general metrics, our construction provides the first coreset for fair clustering. New coresets appear to be a handy tool for designing better approximation and streaming algorithms for fair and other constrained clustering variants

A Survey on Approximation in Parameterized Complexity: Hardness and Algorithms

Parameterization and approximation are two popular ways of coping with NP-hard problems. More recently, the two have also been combined to derive many interesting results. We survey developments in the area both from the algorithmic and hardness perspectives, with emphasis on new techniques and potential future research directions