English

Distributed k-Means and k-Median Clustering on General Topologies

Machine Learning 2020-01-28 v4 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Machine Learning

Abstract

This paper provides new algorithms for distributed clustering for two popular center-based objectives, k-median and k-means. These algorithms have provable guarantees and improve communication complexity over existing approaches. Following a classic approach in clustering by \cite{har2004coresets}, we reduce the problem of finding a clustering with low cost to the problem of finding a coreset of small size. We provide a distributed method for constructing a global coreset which improves over the previous methods by reducing the communication complexity, and which works over general communication topologies. Experimental results on large scale data sets show that this approach outperforms other coreset-based distributed clustering algorithms.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1306.0604,
  title  = {Distributed k-Means and k-Median Clustering on General Topologies},
  author = {Maria Florina Balcan and Steven Ehrlich and Yingyu Liang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.0604},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Corrected Theorem 4 in the appendix

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:27:25.259Z