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Clustering is a fundamental primitive in unsupervised learning. However, classical algorithms for $k$-clustering (such as $k$-median and $k$-means) assume access to exact pairwise distances -- an unrealistic requirement in many modern…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Rahul Raychaudhury , Aryan Esmailpour , Sainyam Galhotra , Stavros Sintos

We introduce and study the $k$-center clustering problem with set outliers, a natural and practical generalization of the classical $k$-center clustering with outliers. Instead of removing individual data points, our model allows discarding…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Vaishali Surianarayanan , Neeraj Kumar , Stavros Sintos

The input to the $k$-median for lines problem is a set $L$ of $n$ lines in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and the goal is to compute a set of $k$ centers (points) in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that minimizes the sum of squared distances over every line in $L$ and its…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Yair Marom , Dan Feldman

The $k$-means algorithm is a prevalent clustering method due to its simplicity, effectiveness, and speed. However, its main disadvantage is its high sensitivity to the initial positions of the cluster centers. The global $k$-means is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-17 Georgios Vardakas , Aristidis Likas

Clustering is a fundamental problem in machine learning where distance-based approaches have dominated the field for many decades. This set of problems is often tackled by partitioning the data into K clusters where the number of clusters…

We analyze online and mini-batch k-means variants. Both scale up the widely used Lloyd 's algorithm via stochastic approximation, and have become popular for large-scale clustering and unsupervised feature learning. We show, for the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-08 Cheng Tang , Claire Monteleoni

In fully dynamic clustering problems, a clustering of a given data set in a metric space must be maintained while it is modified through insertions and deletions of individual points. In this paper, we resolve the complexity of fully…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-03-22 MohammadHossein Bateni , Hossein Esfandiari , Hendrik Fichtenberger , Monika Henzinger , Rajesh Jayaram , Vahab Mirrokni , Andreas Wiese

In this work, we study pairwise fair clustering with $\ell \ge 2$ groups, where for every cluster $C$ and every group $i \in [\ell]$, the number of points in $C$ from group $i$ must be at most $t$ times the number of points in $C$ from any…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Sayan Bandyapadhyay , Eden Chlamtáč , Zachary Friggstad , Mahya Jamshidian , Yury Makarychev , Ali Vakilian

Motivated by an application from geodesy, we introduce a novel clustering problem which is a $k$-center (or k-diameter) problem with a side constraint. For the side constraint, we are given an undirected connectivity graph $G$ on the input…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Lukas Drexler , Jan Eube , Kelin Luo , Dorian Reineccius , Heiko Röglin , Melanie Schmidt , Julian Wargalla

We study a variant of classical clustering formulations in the context of algorithmic fairness, known as diversity-aware clustering. In this variant we are given a collection of facility subsets, and a solution must contain at least a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Suhas Thejaswi , Ameet Gadekar , Bruno Ordozgoiti , Michal Osadnik

The $k$-center problem is to choose a subset of size $k$ from a set of $n$ points such that the maximum distance from each point to its nearest center is minimized. Let $Q=\{Q_1,\ldots,Q_n\}$ be a set of polygons or segments in the…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Vahideh Keikha , Sepideh Aghamolaei , Ali Mohades , Mohammad Ghodsi

Clustering with capacity constraints is a fundamental problem that attracted significant attention throughout the years. In this paper, we give the first FPT constant-factor approximation algorithm for the problem of clustering points in a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Sayan Bandyapadhyay , William Lochet , Saket Saurabh

Over the last few years Explainable Clustering has gathered a lot of attention. Dasgupta et al. [ICML'20] initiated the study of explainable $k$-means and $k$-median clustering problems where the explanation is captured by a threshold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Chengyuan Deng , Surya Teja Gavva , Karthik C. S. , Parth Patel , Adarsh Srinivasan

We study the classic $k$-means/median clustering, which are fundamental problems in unsupervised learning, in the setting where data are partitioned across multiple sites, and where we are allowed to discard a small portion of the data by…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-10-12 Jiecao Chen , Erfan Sadeqi Azer , Qin Zhang

For very large values of $k$, we consider methods for fast $k$-means clustering of massive datasets with $10^7\sim10^9$ points in high-dimensions ($d\geq100$). All current practical methods for this problem have runtimes at least…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Jack Spalding-Jamieson , Eliot Wong Robson , Da Wei Zheng

There has been much progress on efficient algorithms for clustering data points generated by a mixture of $k$ probability distributions under the assumption that the means of the distributions are well-separated, i.e., the distance between…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2010-04-13 Amit Kumar , Ravindran Kannan

Given a finite metric space $(X\cup Y, \mathbf{d})$ the $k$-median problem is to find a set of $k$ centers $C\subseteq Y$ that minimizes $\sum_{p\in X} \min_{c\in C} \mathbf{d}(p,c)$. In general metrics, the best polynomial time algorithm…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Anne Driemel , Jan Höckendorff , Ioannis Psarros , Christian Sohler , Di Yue

The $k$-means algorithm (Lloyd's algorithm) is a widely used method for clustering unlabeled data. A key bottleneck of the $k$-means algorithm is that each iteration requires time linear in the number of data points, which can be expensive…

Clustering is a fundamental unsupervised learning approach. Many clustering algorithms -- such as $k$-means -- rely on the euclidean distance as a similarity measure, which is often not the most relevant metric for high dimensional data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-22 Aude Genevay , Gabriel Dulac-Arnold , Jean-Philippe Vert

The fuzzy or soft $k$-means objective is a popular generalization of the well-known $k$-means problem, extending the clustering capability of the $k$-means to datasets that are uncertain, vague, and otherwise hard to cluster. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Wasim Huleihel , Arya Mazumdar , Soumyabrata Pal