Related papers: On the power of linear programming for K-means clu…
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 this paper, we show that the popular K-means clustering problem can equivalently be reformulated as a conic program of polynomial size. The arising convex optimization problem is NP-hard, but amenable to a tractable semidefinite…
We introduce the ratio-cut polytope defined as the convex hull of ratio-cut vectors corresponding to all partitions of $n$ points in $\mathbb R^m$ into at most $K$ clusters. This polytope is closely related to the convex hull of the…
Linear Programming (LP) relaxations have become powerful tools for finding the most probable (MAP) configuration in graphical models. These relaxations can be solved efficiently using message-passing algorithms such as belief propagation…
Clustering is one of the most fundamental tools in data science and machine learning, and k-means clustering is one of the most common such methods. There is a variety of approximate algorithms for the k-means problem, but computing the…
We introduce a novel method for clustering using a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the Max k-Cut problem. The approach is based on a new methodology for rounding the solution of an SDP relaxation using iterated linear…
Spectral clustering has become one of the most widely used clustering techniques when the structure of the individual clusters is non-convex or highly anisotropic. Yet, despite its immense popularity, there exists fairly little theory about…
Quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQPs) are ubiquitous in optimization: Such problems arise in applications from operations research, power systems, signal processing, chemical engineering, and portfolio theory, among others.…
The linear programming (LP) approach has a long history in the theory of approximate dynamic programming. When it comes to computation, however, the LP approach often suffers from poor scalability. In this work, we introduce a relaxed…
Kernel $k$-means clustering is a powerful tool for unsupervised learning of non-linearly separable data. Since the earliest attempts, researchers have noted that such algorithms often become trapped by local minima arising from…
Convex clustering, a convex relaxation of k-means clustering and hierarchical clustering, has drawn recent attentions since it nicely addresses the instability issue of traditional nonconvex clustering methods. Although its computational…
K-means is a classical clustering algorithm with wide applications. However, soft K-means, or fuzzy c-means at m=1, remains unsolved since 1981. To address this challenging open problem, we propose a novel clustering model, i.e.…
Clustering is a hard discrete optimization problem. Nonconvex approaches such as low-rank semidefinite programming (SDP) have recently demonstrated promising statistical and local algorithmic guarantees for cluster recovery. Due to the…
Clustering is one of the most important unsupervised problems in machine learning and statistics. Among many existing algorithms, kernel k-means has drawn much research attention due to its ability to find non-linear cluster boundaries and…
The K-means algorithm is arguably the most popular data clustering method, commonly applied to processed datasets in some "feature spaces", as is in spectral clustering. Highly sensitive to initializations, however, K-means encounters a…
We advocate Laplacian K-modes for joint clustering and density mode finding, and propose a concave-convex relaxation of the problem, which yields a parallel algorithm that scales up to large datasets and high dimensions. We optimize a tight…
Correlation Clustering is a fundamental and widely-studied problem in unsupervised learning and data mining. The input is a graph and the goal is to construct a clustering minimizing the number of inter-cluster edges plus the number of…
The analysis of continously larger datasets is a task of major importance in a wide variety of scientific fields. In this sense, cluster analysis algorithms are a key element of exploratory data analysis, due to their easiness in the…
Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a powerful tool for tackling a wide range of computationally hard problems such as clustering. Despite the high accuracy, semidefinite programs are often too slow in practice with poor scalability on large…
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…