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Cluster analysis is a popular unsupervised learning tool used in many disciplines to identify heterogeneous sub-populations within a sample. However, validating cluster analysis results and determining the number of clusters in a data set…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-26 Ali Turfah , Xiaoquan Wen

Application of K-Means algorithm is restricted by the fact that the number of clusters should be known beforehand. Previously suggested methods to solve this problem are either ad hoc or require parametric assumptions and complicated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-05 Sukavanan Nanjundan , Shreeviknesh Sankaran , C. R. Arjun , G. Paavai Anand

Clustering is often a challenging problem because of the inherent ambiguity in what the "correct" clustering should be. Even when the number of clusters $K$ is known, this ambiguity often still exists, particularly when there is variation…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Kayvon Mazooji , Ilan Shomorony

We study exact recovery conditions for convex relaxations of point cloud clustering problems, focusing on two of the most common optimization problems for unsupervised clustering: $k$-means and $k$-median clustering. Motivations for…

In longitudinal data analysis, observation points of repeated measurements over time often vary among subjects except in well-designed experimental studies. Additionally, measurements for each subject are typically obtained at only a few…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-11-14 Michio Yamamoto , Yoshikazu Terada

There is no, nor will there ever be, single best clustering algorithm. Nevertheless, we would still like to be able to distinguish between methods that work well on certain task types and those that systematically underperform. Clustering…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Marek Gagolewski

Model-based clustering defines population level clusters relative to a model that embeds notions of similarity. Algorithms tailored to such models yield estimated clusters with a clear statistical interpretation. We take this view here and…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-12-14 Florentina Bunea , Christophe Giraud , Xi Luo , Martin Royer , Nicolas Verzelen

Notwithstanding the popularity of conventional clustering algorithms such as K-means and probabilistic clustering, their clustering results are sensitive to the presence of outliers in the data. Even a few outliers can compromise the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-05-27 Pedro A. Forero , Vassilis Kekatos , Georgios B. Giannakis

Clustering is one of the main tasks in exploratory data analysis and descriptive statistics where the main objective is partitioning observations in groups. Clustering has a broad range of application in varied domains like climate,…

Databases · Computer Science 2012-03-20 Saptarsi Goswami , Amlan Chakrabarti

In this paper, we define and study a new notion of stability for the $k$-means clustering scheme building upon the notion of quantization of a probability measure. We connect this notion of stability to a geometric feature of the underlying…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-03-09 Thibaut Le Gouic , Quentin Paris

Typically clustering algorithms provide clustering solutions with prespecified number of clusters. The lack of a priori knowledge on the true number of underlying clusters in the dataset makes it important to have a metric to compare the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-20 Amber Srivastava , Mayank Baranwal , Srinivasa Salapaka

This paper studies the optimality of kernel methods in high-dimensional data clustering. Recent works have studied the large sample performance of kernel clustering in the high-dimensional regime, where Euclidean distance becomes less…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-03 Leena Chennuru Vankadara , Debarghya Ghoshdastidar

The paper presents the algorithm for clustering a dataset by grouping the optimal, from the point of view of the BIC criterion, number of Gaussian clusters into the optimal, from the point of view of their statistical separability,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Oleg I. Berngardt

Despite its popularity, it is widely recognized that the investigation of some theoretical aspects of clustering has been relatively sparse. One of the main reasons for this lack of theoretical results is surely the fact that, whereas for…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2015-12-11 José E. Chacón

In this work, we study the $k$-median and $k$-means clustering problems when the data is distributed across many servers and can contain outliers. While there has been a lot of work on these problems for worst-case instances, we focus on…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2019-03-08 Pranjal Awasthi , Ainesh Bakshi , Maria-Florina Balcan , Colin White , David Woodruff

Designing efficient, effective, and consistent metric clustering algorithms is a significant challenge attracting growing attention. Traditional approaches focus on the stability of cluster centers; unfortunately, this neglects the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Diptarka Chakraborty , Hendrik Fichtenberger , Bernhard Haeupler , Silvio Lattanzi , Ashkan Norouzi-Fard , Ola Svensson

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

While clustering is ubiquitously used across science and industry, uncertainty in cluster assignments is rarely quantified with rigorous guarantees. We propose a novel conformal inference framework for clustering that returns confidence…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-04-13 YoonHaeng Hur , Anirban Nath , Genevera Allen

We consider the problem of center-based clustering in low-dimensional Euclidean spaces under the perturbation stability assumption. An instance is $\alpha$-stable if the underlying optimal clustering continues to remain optimal even when…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Pankaj K. Agarwal , Hsien-Chih Chang , Kamesh Munagala , Erin Taylor , Emo Welzl

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