Related papers: Clustering What Matters in Constrained Settings
We study the classical metric $k$-median clustering problem over a set of input rankings (i.e., permutations), which has myriad applications, from social-choice theory to web search and databases. A folklore algorithm provides a…
Clustering is a popular form of unsupervised learning for geometric data. Unfortunately, many clustering algorithms lead to cluster assignments that are hard to explain, partially because they depend on all the features of the data in a…
The Metric $k$-median problem over a metric space $(\mathcal{X}, d)$ is defined as follows: given a set $L \subseteq \mathcal{X}$ of facility locations and a set $C \subseteq \mathcal{X}$ of clients, open a set $F \subseteq L$ of $k$…
Bateni et al. has recently introduced the weak-strong distance oracle model to study clustering problems in settings with limited distance information. Given query access to the strong-oracle and weak-oracle in the weak-strong oracle model,…
$k$-means clustering is a well-studied problem due to its wide applicability. Unfortunately, there exist strong theoretical limits on the performance of any algorithm for the $k$-means problem on worst-case inputs. To overcome this barrier,…
We consider the problem of clustering with $K$-means and Gaussian mixture models with a constraint on the separation between the centers in the context of real-valued data. We first propose a dynamic programming approach to solving the…
In this paper, we investigate the learning-augmented $k$-median clustering problem, which aims to improve the performance of traditional clustering algorithms by preprocessing the point set with a predictor of error rate $\alpha \in [0,1)$.…
The $k$-center problem for a point set~$P$ asks for a collection of $k$ congruent balls (that is, balls of equal radius) that together cover all the points in $P$ and whose radius is minimized. The $k$-center problem with outliers is…
We revisit the $(f,g)$-clustering problem that we introduced in a recent work [SODA'25], and which subsumes fundamental clustering problems such as $k$-Center, $k$-Median, Min-Sum of Radii, and Min-Load $k$-Clustering. This problem assigns…
Individual fairness guarantees are often desirable properties to have, but they become hard to formalize when the dataset contains outliers. Here, we investigate the problem of developing an individually fair $k$-means clustering algorithm…
The input to the \emph{sets-$k$-means} problem is an integer $k\geq 1$ and a set $\mathcal{P}=\{P_1,\cdots,P_n\}$ of sets in $\mathbb{R}^d$. The goal is to compute a set $C$ of $k$ centers (points) in $\mathbb{R}^d$ that minimizes the sum…
Kernel $k$-means clustering can correctly identify and extract a far more varied collection of cluster structures than the linear $k$-means clustering algorithm. However, kernel $k$-means clustering is computationally expensive when the…
Center-based clustering has attracted significant research interest from both theory and practice. In many practical applications, input data often contain background knowledge that can be used to improve clustering results. In this work,…
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…
We consider clustering problems with {\em non-uniform lower bounds and outliers}, and obtain the {\em first approximation guarantees} for these problems. We have a set $\F$ of facilities with lower bounds $\{L_i\}_{i\in\F}$ and a set $\D$…
Clustering plays a crucial role in computer science, facilitating data analysis and problem-solving across numerous fields. By partitioning large datasets into meaningful groups, clustering reveals hidden structures and relationships within…
This paper presents universal algorithms for clustering problems, including the widely studied $k$-median, $k$-means, and $k$-center objectives. The input is a metric space containing all potential client locations. The algorithm must…
We study $k$-means clustering in a semi-supervised setting. Given an oracle that returns whether two given points belong to the same cluster in a fixed optimal clustering, we investigate the following question: how many oracle queries are…
Center-based clustering is a fundamental primitive for data analysis and becomes very challenging for large datasets. In this paper, we focus on the popular $k$-center variant which, given a set $S$ of points from some metric space and a…
A well-known bottleneck of Min-Sum-of-Square Clustering (MSSC, the celebrated $k$-means problem) is to tackle the presence of outliers. In this paper, we propose a Partial clustering variant termed PMSSC which considers a fixed number of…