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K-means clustering is a workhorse of unsupervised learning, but it is notoriously brittle to outliers, distribution shifts, and limited sample sizes. Viewing k-means as Lloyd--Max quantization of the empirical distribution, we develop a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Vikrant Malik , Taylan Kargin , Babak Hassibi

Given a point set S and an unknown metric d on S, we study the problem of efficiently partitioning S into k clusters while querying few distances between the points. In our model we assume that we have access to one versus all queries that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-08-12 Konstantin Voevodski , Maria-Florina Balcan , Heiko Roglin , Shang-Hua Teng , Yu Xia

We consider the problem of learning a discrete distribution in the presence of an $\epsilon$ fraction of malicious data sources. Specifically, we consider the setting where there is some underlying distribution, $p$, and each data source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Mingda Qiao , Gregory Valiant

One key use of k-means clustering is to identify cluster prototypes which can serve as representative points for a dataset. However, a drawback of using k-means cluster centers as representative points is that such points distort the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-15 Arvind Krishna , Simon Mak , Roshan Joseph

In this work, we revisit the problem of uniformity testing of discrete probability distributions. A fundamental problem in distribution testing, testing uniformity over a known domain has been addressed over a significant line of works, and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-08-17 Tuğkan Batu , Clément L. Canonne

We study supervised learning problems using clustering constraints to impose structure on either features or samples, seeking to help both prediction and interpretation. The problem of clustering features arises naturally in text…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Vincent Roulet , Fajwel Fogel , Alexandre d'Aspremont , Francis Bach

In this work, we study diversity-aware clustering problems where the data points are associated with multiple attributes resulting in intersecting groups. A clustering solution needs to ensure that the number of chosen cluster centers from…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Suhas Thejaswi , Ameet Gadekar , Bruno Ordozgoiti , Aristides Gionis

We revisit the problem of tolerant distribution testing. That is, given samples from an unknown distribution $p$ over $\{1, \dots, n\}$, is it $\varepsilon_1$-close to or $\varepsilon_2$-far from a reference distribution $q$ (in total…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Clément L. Canonne , Ayush Jain , Gautam Kamath , Jerry Li

This paper studies the sample complexity of searching over multiple populations. We consider a large number of populations, each corresponding to either distribution P0 or P1. The goal of the search problem studied here is to find one…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-11-17 Matthew L. Malloy , Gongguo Tang , Robert D. Nowak

We introduce a new method for performing clustering with the aim of fitting clusters with different scatters and weights. It is designed by allowing to handle a proportion $\alpha$ of contaminating data to guarantee the robustness of the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2008-12-18 Luis A. García-Escudero , Alfonso Gordaliza , Carlos Matrán , Agustin Mayo-Iscar

Given a set of points, clustering consists of finding a partition of a point set into $k$ clusters such that the center to which a point is assigned is as close as possible. Most commonly, centers are points themselves, which leads to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Maria Sofia Bucarelli , Matilde Fjeldsø Larsen , Chris Schwiegelshohn , Mads Bech Toftrup

We study the classic $k$-means/median clustering, which are fundamental problems in unsupervised learning, in the setting where data are partitioned across multiple sites, and where we are allowed to discard a small portion of the data by…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-10-12 Jiecao Chen , Erfan Sadeqi Azer , Qin Zhang

Although distance measures are used in many machine learning algorithms, the literature on the context-independent selection and evaluation of distance measures is limited in the sense that prior knowledge is used. In cluster analysis,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Michael C. Thrun

We explore potential quantum speedups for the fundamental problem of testing the properties of closeness and $k$-wise uniformity of probability distributions. Closeness testing is the problem of distinguishing whether two $n$-dimensional…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-27 Jingquan Luo , Qisheng Wang , Lvzhou Li

In this paper, we test whether two datasets share a common clustering structure. As a leading example, we focus on comparing clustering structures in two independent random samples from two mixtures of multivariate normal distributions.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-11-21 Chao Gao , Zongming Ma

We initiate the study of the following general clustering problem. We seek to partition a given set $P$ of data points into $k$ clusters by finding a set $X$ of $k$ centers and assigning each data point to one of the centers. The cost of a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Martin G. Herold , Evangelos Kipouridis , Joachim Spoerhase

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…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Martin G. Herold , Evangelos Kipouridis , Joachim Spoerhase

We develop a novel clustering method for distributional data, where each data point is regarded as a probability distribution on the real line. For distributional data, it has been challenging to develop a clustering method that utilizes…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-24 Ryo Okano , Masaaki Imaizumi

Clustering is a NP-hard problem. Thus, no optimal algorithm exists, heuristics are applied to cluster the data. Heuristics can be very resource-intensive, if not applied properly. For substantially large data sets computational efficiencies…

Databases · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Mujahid Sultan

The problem of constrained $k$-center clustering has attracted significant attention in the past decades. In this paper, we study balanced $k$-center cluster where the size of each cluster is constrained by the given lower and upper bounds.…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2017-04-11 Hu Ding