k-variates++: more pluses in the k-means++

Abstract k-means++ seeding has become a de facto standard for hard clustering algorithms. In this paper, our first contribution is a two-way generalisation of this seeding, k-variates++, that includes the sampling of general densities rather than just a discrete set of Dirac densities anchored at the point locations, and a generalisation of the well known Arthur-Vassilvitskii (AV) approximation guarantee, in the form of a bias+variance approximation bound of the global optimum. This approximation exhibits a reduced dependency on the "noise" component with respect to the optimal potential -actually approaching the statistical lower bound. We show that kvariates++ reduces to efficient (biased seeding) clustering algorithms tailored to specific frameworks; these include distributed, streaming and on-line clustering, with direct approximation results for these algorithms. Finally, we present a novel application of k-variates++ to differential privacy. For either the specific frameworks considered here, or for the differential privacy setting, there is little to no prior results on the direct application of k-means++ and its approximation bounds -state of the art contenders appear to be significantly more complex and / or display less favorable (approximation) properties. We stress that our algorithms can still be run in cases where there is no closed form solution for the population minimizer. We demonstrate the applicability of our analysis via experimental evaluation on several domains and settings, displaying competitive performances vs state of the art

Compressive Learning with Privacy Guarantees

International audienceThis work addresses the problem of learning from large collections of data with privacy guarantees. The compressive learning framework proposes to deal with the large scale of datasets by compressing them into a single vector of generalized random moments, from which the learning task is then performed. We show that a simple perturbation of this mechanism with additive noise is sufficient to satisfy differential privacy, a well established formalism for defining and quantifying the privacy of a random mechanism. We combine this with a feature subsampling mechanism, which reduces the computational cost without damaging privacy. The framework is applied to the tasks of Gaussian modeling, k-means clustering and principal component analysis (PCA), for which sharp privacy bounds are derived. Empirically, the quality (for subsequent learning) of the compressed representation produced by our mechanism is strongly related with the induced noise level, for which we give analytical expressions