Related papers: On the Hardness of Average-case k-SUM
The $k$-means algorithm is one of the most widely used clustering heuristics. Despite its simplicity, analyzing its running time and quality of approximation is surprisingly difficult and can lead to deep insights that can be used to…
We consider the canonical Subset Sum problem: given a list of positive integers $a_1,\ldots,a_n$ and a target integer $t$ with $t > a_i$ for all $i$, determine if there is an $S \subseteq [n]$ such that $\sum_{i \in S} a_i = t$. The…
Apart from the principles and methodologies inherited from Economics and Game Theory, the studies in Algorithmic Mechanism Design typically employ the worst-case analysis and approximation schemes of Theoretical Computer Science. For…
Subset-Sum and k-SAT are two of the most extensively studied problems in computer science, and conjectures about their hardness are among the cornerstones of fine-grained complexity. One of the most intriguing open problems in this area is…
We generalise the results of Bhattacharya et al. (Journal of Computing Systems, 62(1):93-115, 2018) for the list-$k$-means problem defined as -- for a (unknown) partition $X_1, ..., X_k$ of the dataset $X \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$, find a…
Given a multiset $S$ of $n$ positive integers and a target integer $t$, the subset sum problem is to decide if there is a subset of $S$ that sums up to $t$. We present a new divide-and-conquer algorithm that computes all the realizable…
Let $\Phi$ be a random $k$-CNF formula on $n$ variables and $m$ clauses, where each clause is a disjunction of $k$ literals chosen independently and uniformly. Our goal is to sample an approximately uniform solution of $\Phi$ (or…
In a classical covering problem, we are given a set of requests that we need to satisfy (fully or partially), by buying a subset of items at minimum cost. For example, in the k-MST problem we want to find the cheapest tree spanning at least…
Let $k$ and $n$ be positive integers. Define $R(n,k)$ to be the minimum positive value of $$ | e_i \sqrt{s_1} + e_2 \sqrt{s_2} + ... + e_k \sqrt{s_k} -t | $$ where $ s_1, s_2, ..., s_k$ are positive integers no larger than $n$, $t$ is an…
We propose the stochastic average gradient (SAG) method for optimizing the sum of a finite number of smooth convex functions. Like stochastic gradient (SG) methods, the SAG method's iteration cost is independent of the number of terms in…
K-means plays a vital role in data mining and is the simplest and most widely used algorithm under the Euclidean Minimum Sum-of-Squares Clustering (MSSC) model. However, its performance drastically drops when applied to vast amounts of…
In this paper, the decades-old clustering method k-means is revisited. The original distortion minimization model of k-means is addressed by a pure stochastic minimization procedure. In each step of the iteration, one sample is tentatively…
We introduce a method for proving Sum-of-Squares (SoS)/ Lasserre hierarchy lower bounds when the initial problem formulation exhibits a high degree of symmetry. Our main technical theorem allows us to reduce the study of the positive…
Handling an infinite number of inequality constraints in infinite-dimensional spaces occurs in many fields, from global optimization to optimal transport. These problems have been tackled individually in several previous articles through…
This paper establishes a statistical versus computational trade-off for solving a basic high-dimensional machine learning problem via a basic convex relaxation method. Specifically, we consider the {\em Sparse Principal Component Analysis}…
This article details the algorithmics in FLSSS, an R package for solving various subset sum problems. The fundamental algorithm engages the problem via combinatorial space compression adaptive to constraints, relaxations and variations that…
We consider the minimum vertex cover problem in hypergraphs in which every hyperedge has size k (also known as minimum hitting set problem, or minimum set cover with element frequency k). Simple algorithms exist that provide…
In this paper, we consider the weighted online set k-multicover problem. In this problem, we have a universe V of elements, a family S of subsets of V with a positive real cost for every set in S and a "coverage factor" (positive integer)…
The minimum sum-of-squares clustering (MSSC), or k-means type clustering, is traditionally considered an unsupervised learning task. In recent years, the use of background knowledge to improve the cluster quality and promote…
As most robust combinatorial min-max and min-max regret problems with discrete uncertainty sets are NP-hard, research into approximation algorithm and approximability bounds has been a fruitful area of recent work. A simple and well-known…