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A celebrated result of Pollard proves asymptotic consistency for $k$-means clustering when the population distribution has finite variance. In this work, we point out that the population-level $k$-means clustering problem is, in fact,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-07-09 Moïse Blanchard , Adam Quinn Jaffe , Nikita Zhivotovskiy

Motivated by the fact that distances between data points in many real-world clustering instances are often based on heuristic measures, Bilu and Linial~\cite{BL} proposed analyzing objective based clustering problems under the assumption…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-13 Maria Florina Balcan , Yingyu Liang

There has been considerable work on improving popular clustering algorithm `K-means' in terms of mean squared error (MSE) and speed, both. However, most of the k-means variants tend to compute distance of each data point to each cluster…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-18 Siddhesh Khandelwal , Amit Awekar

The k-means clustering algorithm is a popular algorithm that partitions data into k clusters. There are many improvements to accelerate the standard algorithm. Most current research employs upper and lower bounds on point-to-cluster…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Andreas Lang , Erich Schubert

One key use of k-means clustering is to identify cluster prototypes which can serve as representative points for a dataset. However, a drawback of using k-means cluster centers as representative points is that such points distort the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-15 Arvind Krishna , Simon Mak , Roshan Joseph

In this paper, we consider two types of robust models of the $k$-median/$k$-means problems: the outlier-version ($k$-MedO/$k$-MeaO) and the penalty-version ($k$-MedP/$k$-MeaP), in which we can mark some points as outliers and discard them.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Yishui Wang , Rolf H. Möhring , Chenchen Wu , Dachuan Xu , Dongmei Zhang

Ashtiani et al. proposed a Semi-Supervised Active Clustering framework (SSAC), where the learner is allowed to make adaptive queries to a domain expert. The queries are of the kind "do two given points belong to the same optimal cluster?"…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-10-05 Nir Ailon , Anup Bhattacharya , Ragesh Jaiswal , Amit Kumar

We study data clustering problems with $\ell_p$-norm objectives (e.g. $k$-Median and $k$-Means) in the context of individual fairness. The dataset consists of $n$ points, and we want to find $k$ centers such that (a) the objective is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-06-24 Deeparnab Chakrabarty , Maryam Negahbani

This paper investigates the following natural greedy procedure for clustering in the bi-criterion setting: iteratively grow a set of centers, in each round adding the center from a candidate set that maximally decreases clustering cost. In…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-07-22 Daniel Hsu , Matus Telgarsky

In the standard planar $k$-center clustering problem, one is given a set $P$ of $n$ points in the plane, and the goal is to select $k$ center points, so as to minimize the maximum distance over points in $P$ to their nearest center. Here we…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2021-09-29 Hongyao Huang , Georgiy Klimenko , Benjamin Raichel

We consider the classic $k$-center problem {in the constant dimensional Euclidean space} under a parallel setting, on the low-local-space Massively Parallel Computation (MPC) model, with local space per machine of ${O}(n^{\delta})$, where…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Sam Coy , Artur Czumaj , Gopinath Mishra

$K$-means clustering is one of the most widely-used partitioning algorithm in cluster analysis due to its simplicity and computational efficiency. However, $K$-means does not provide an appropriate clustering result when applying to data…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-03-18 Bingling Wang , Yinxing Li , Wolfgang Karl Härdle

Clustering algorithms have long been the topic of research, representing the more popular side of unsupervised learning. Since clustering analysis is one of the best ways to find some clarity and structure within raw data, this paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Naitik Gada

The $k$-center problem is a classical clustering problem in which one is asked to find a partitioning of a point set $P$ into $k$ clusters such that the maximum radius of any cluster is minimized. It is well-studied. But what if we add up…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Lukas Drexler , Annika Hennes , Abhiruk Lahiri , Melanie Schmidt , Julian Wargalla

The clustering problem, in its many variants, has numerous applications in operations research and computer science (e.g., in applications in bioinformatics, image processing, social network analysis, etc.). As sizes of data sets have grown…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2017-10-24 Sayan Bandyapadhyay , Tanmay Inamdar , Shreyas Pai , Sriram V. Pemmaraju

The k-means++ seeding algorithm is one of the most popular algorithms that is used for finding the initial $k$ centers when using the k-means heuristic. The algorithm is a simple sampling procedure and can be described as follows: {quote}…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2013-06-19 Ragesh Jaiswal , Prachi Jain , Saumya Yadav

We combine K-means clustering with the least-squares kernel classification method. K-means clustering is used to extract a set of representative vectors for each class. The least-squares kernel method uses these representative vectors as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-25 M. Andrecut

Supervised classification can be effective for prediction but sometimes weak on interpretability or explainability (XAI). Clustering, on the other hand, tends to isolate categories or profiles that can be meaningful but there is no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Vincent Lemaire , Oumaima Alaoui Ismaili , Antoine Cornuéjols , Dominique Gay

Many algorithms for approximate nearest neighbor search in high-dimensional spaces partition the data into clusters. At query time, in order to avoid exhaustive search, an index selects the few (or a single) clusters nearest to the query…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2010-09-27 Romain Tavenard , Laurent Amsaleg , Hervé Jégou

We study k-median clustering under the sequential no-substitution setting. In this setting, a data stream is sequentially observed, and some of the points are selected by the algorithm as cluster centers. However, a point can be selected as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Tom Hess , Michal Moshkovitz , Sivan Sabato