English

Exact Acceleration of K-Means++ and K-Means$\|$

Machine Learning 2021-05-10 v1 Artificial Intelligence Mathematical Software Machine Learning

Abstract

K-Means++ and its distributed variant K-Means\| have become de facto tools for selecting the initial seeds of K-means. While alternatives have been developed, the effectiveness, ease of implementation, and theoretical grounding of the K-means++ and \| methods have made them difficult to "best" from a holistic perspective. By considering the limited opportunities within seed selection to perform pruning, we develop specialized triangle inequality pruning strategies and a dynamic priority queue to show the first acceleration of K-Means++ and K-Means\| that is faster in run-time while being algorithmicly equivalent. For both algorithms we are able to reduce distance computations by over 500×500\times. For K-means++ this results in up to a 17×\times speedup in run-time and a 551×551\times speedup for K-means\|. We achieve this with simple, but carefully chosen, modifications to known techniques which makes it easy to integrate our approach into existing implementations of these algorithms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.02936,
  title  = {Exact Acceleration of K-Means++ and K-Means$\|$},
  author = {Edward Raff},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.02936},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

to appear in the 30th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-21)