Related papers: Complexity of Local Search for Euclidean Clusterin…
The class PLS (Polynomial Local Search) captures the complexity of finding a solution that is locally optimal and has proven to be an important concept in the theory of local search. It has been shown that local search versions of various…
The most well known and ubiquitous clustering problem encountered in nearly every branch of science is undoubtedly $k$-means: given a set of data points and a parameter $k$, select $k$ centres and partition the data points into $k$ clusters…
How hard is it to find a local optimum? If we are given a graph and want to find a locally maximal cut--meaning that the number of edges in the cut can't be improved by moving a single vertex from one side to the other--then just iterating…
We give the first polynomial-time approximation schemes (PTASs) for the following problems: (1) uniform facility location in edge-weighted planar graphs; (2) $k$-median and $k$-means in edge-weighted planar graphs; (3) $k$-means in…
We study Ward's method for the hierarchical $k$-means problem. This popular greedy heuristic is based on the \emph{complete linkage} paradigm: Starting with all data points as singleton clusters, it successively merges two clusters to form…
We provide efficient constant factor approximation algorithms for the problems of finding a hierarchical clustering of a point set in any metric space, minimizing the sum of minimimum spanning tree lengths within each cluster, and in the…
Finding the optimal $k$-means clustering is NP-hard in general and many heuristics have been designed for minimizing monotonically the $k$-means objective. We first show how to extend Lloyd's batched relocation heuristic and Hartigan's…
\textit{Clustering problems} often arise in the fields like data mining, machine learning etc. to group a collection of objects into similar groups with respect to a similarity (or dissimilarity) measure. Among the clustering problems,…
Clustering is a fundamental technique in data analysis and machine learning, used to group similar data points together. Among various clustering methods, the Minimum Sum-of-Squares Clustering (MSSC) is one of the most widely used. MSSC…
We propose the first \emph{local search} algorithm for Euclidean clustering that attains an $O(1)$-approximation in almost-linear time. Specifically, for Euclidean $k$-Means, our algorithm achieves an $O(c)$-approximation in $\tilde{O}(n^{1…
Clustering problems are well-studied in a variety of fields such as data science, operations research, and computer science. Such problems include variants of centre location problems, $k$-median, and $k$-means to name a few. In some cases,…
In this paper, we study the complexity of computing locally optimal solutions for weighted versions of standard set problems such as SetCover, SetPacking, and many more. For our investigation, we use the framework of PLS, as defined in…
The $k$-median and $k$-means clustering objectives are classic objectives for modeling clustering in a metric space. Given a set of points in a metric space, the goal of the $k$-median (resp. $k$-means) problem is to find $k$ representative…
$k$-means clustering is a fundamental problem in unsupervised learning. The problem concerns finding a partition of the data points into $k$ clusters such that the within-cluster variation is minimized. Despite its importance and wide…
We revisit Pollard's classical result on consistency for $k$-means clustering in Euclidean space, with a focus on extensions in two directions: first, to problems where the data may come from interesting geometric settings (e.g., Riemannian…
We provide simple and fast polynomial time approximation schemes (PTASs) for several variants of the max-sum diversification problem which, in its most basic form, is as follows: Given n points p_1,...,p_n in R^d and an integer k, select k…
Clustering is a classic topic in optimization with $k$-means being one of the most fundamental such problems. In the absence of any restrictions on the input, the best known algorithm for $k$-means with a provable guarantee is a simple…
We analyze the running time of the Hartigan-Wong method, an old algorithm for the $k$-means clustering problem. First, we construct an instance on the line on which the method can take $2^{\Omega(n)}$ steps to converge, demonstrating that…
Graph clustering is a fundamental problem that has been extensively studied both in theory and practice. The problem has been defined in several ways in literature and most of them have been proven to be NP-Hard. Due to their high practical…
We consider the problem of finding a local optimum for Max-Cut with FLIP-neighborhood, in which exactly one node changes the partition. Schaeffer and Yannakakis (SICOMP, 1991) showed PLS-completeness of this problem on graphs with unbounded…