English

On the Communication Complexity of Distributed Clustering

Computational Complexity 2017-02-03 v3

Abstract

In this paper we give a first set of communication lower bounds for distributed clustering problems, in particular, for k-center, k-median and k-means. When the input is distributed across a large number of machines and the number of clusters k is small, our lower bounds match the current best upper bounds up to a logarithmic factor. We have designed a new composition framework in our proofs for multiparty number-in-hand communication complexity which may be of independent interest.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1507.00026,
  title  = {On the Communication Complexity of Distributed Clustering},
  author = {Qin Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1507.00026},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

This paper has been withdrawn by the author due to the fact that simpler proofs exist; see arXiv:1702.00196

R2 v1 2026-06-22T10:03:20.856Z