English

Co-Clustering Under the Maximum Norm

Discrete Mathematics 2019-06-17 v3

Abstract

Co-clustering, that is, partitioning a numerical matrix into homogeneous submatrices, has many applications ranging from bioinformatics to election analysis. Many interesting variants of co-clustering are NP-hard. We focus on the basic variant of co-clustering where the homogeneity of a submatrix is defined in terms of minimizing the maximum distance between two entries. In this context, we spot several NP-hard as well as a number of relevant polynomial-time solvable special cases, thus charting the border of tractability for this challenging data clustering problem. For instance, we provide polynomial-time solvability when having to partition the rows and columns into two subsets each (meaning that one obtains four submatrices). When partitioning rows and columns into three subsets each, however, we encounter NP-hardness even for input matrices containing only values from {0, 1, 2}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.05693,
  title  = {Co-Clustering Under the Maximum Norm},
  author = {Laurent Bulteau and Vincent Froese and Sepp Hartung and Rolf Niedermeier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.05693},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:12:42.291Z