In this paper, we consider a class of constrained clustering problems of points in @math , where @math could be rather high. A common feature of these problems is that their optimal clusterings no longer have the locality property (due to the additional constraints), which is a key property required by many algorithms for their unconstrained counterparts. To overcome the difficulty caused by the loss of locality, we present in this paper a unified framework, called Peeling-and-Enclosing (PnE) , to iteratively solve two variants of the constrained clustering problems, constrained @math -means clustering ( @math -CMeans) and constrained @math -median clustering ( @math -CMedian). Our framework is based on two standalone geometric techniques, called Simplex Lemma and Weaker Simplex Lemma , for @math -CMeans and @math -CMedian, respectively. The simplex lemma (or weaker simplex lemma) enables us to efficiently approximate the mean (or median) point of an unknown set of points by searching a small-size grid, independent of the dimensionality of the space, in a simplex (or the surrounding region of a simplex), and thus can be used to handle high dimensional data. If @math and @math are fixed numbers, our framework generates, in nearly linear time ( i.e., @math ), @math @math -tuple candidates for the @math mean or median points, and one of them induces a @math -approximation for @math -CMeans or @math -CMedian, where @math is the number of points. Combining this unified framework with a problem-specific selection algorithm (which determines the best @math -tuple candidate), we obtain a @math -approximation for each of the constrained clustering problems. We expect that our technique will be applicable to other constrained clustering problems without locality.
As for the hardness of the problem, Dasgupta @cite_3 showed that it is NP-hard for @math -means clustering in high dimensional space even if @math ; @cite_45 proved that there is no PTAS for @math -means clustering if both @math and @math are large, unless @math . Guruswami and Indyk @cite_16 showed that it is NP-hard to obtain any PTAS for @math -median clustering if @math is not a constant and @math is @math .
@cite_45 @cite_3 @cite_16
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We consider @math -median clustering in finite metric spaces and @math -means clustering in Euclidean spaces, in the setting where @math is part of the input (not a constant). For the @math -means problem, show that if the optimal @math -means clustering of the input is more expensive than the optimal @math -means clustering by a factor of @math , then one can achieve a @math -approximation to the @math -means optimal in time polynomial in @math and @math by using a variant of Lloyd's algorithm. In this work we substantially improve this approximation guarantee. We show that given only the condition that the @math -means optimal is more expensive than the @math -means optimal by a factor @math for some constant @math , we can obtain a PTAS. In particular, under this assumption, for any @math we achieve a @math -approximation to the @math -means optimal in time polynomial in @math and @math , and exponential in @math and @math . We thus decouple the strength of the assumption from the quality of the approximation ratio. We also give a PTAS for the @math -median problem in finite metrics under the analogous assumption as well. For @math -means, we in addition give a randomized algorithm with improved running time of @math . Our technique also obtains a PTAS under the assumption of that all @math approximations are @math -close to a desired target clustering, in the case that all target clusters have size greater than @math and @math is constant. Note that the motivation of is that for many clustering problems, the objective function is only a proxy for the true goal of getting close to the target. From this perspective, our improvement is that for @math -means in Euclidean spaces we reduce the distance of the clustering found to the target from @math to @math when all target clusters are large, and for @math -median we improve the largeness'' condition needed in the work of to get exactly @math -close from @math to @math . Our results are based on a new notion of clustering stability. The Euclidean @math -means problem is a classical problem that has been extensively studied in the theoretical computer science, machine learning and the computational geometry communities. In this problem, we are given a set of @math points in Euclidean space @math , and the goal is to choose @math centers in @math so that the sum of squared distances of each point to its nearest center is minimized. The best approximation algorithms for this problem include a polynomial time constant factor approximation for general @math and a @math -approximation which runs in time @math . At the other extreme, the only known computational complexity result for this problem is NP-hardness [ADHP'09]. The main difficulty in obtaining hardness results stems from the Euclidean nature of the problem, and the fact that any point in @math can be a potential center. This gap in understanding left open the intriguing possibility that the problem might admit a PTAS for all @math . In this paper we provide the first hardness of approximation for the Euclidean @math -means problem. Concretely, we show that there exists a constant @math such that it is NP-hard to approximate the @math -means objective to within a factor of @math . We show this via an efficient reduction from the vertex cover problem on triangle-free graphs: given a triangle-free graph, the goal is to choose the fewest number of vertices which are incident on all the edges. Additionally, we give a proof that the current best hardness results for vertex cover can be carried over to triangle-free graphs. To show this we transform @math , a known hard vertex cover instance, by taking a graph product with a suitably chosen graph @math , and showing that the size of the (normalized) maximum independent set is almost exactly preserved in the product graph using a spectral analysis, which might be of independent interest. Clustering problems are well-studied in a variety of fields such as data science, operations research, and computer science. Such problems include variants of centre location problems, @math -median, and @math -means to name a few. In some cases, not all data points need to be clustered; some may be discarded for various reasons. We study clustering problems with outliers. More specifically, we look at Uncapacitated Facility Location (UFL), @math -Median, and @math -Means. In UFL with outliers, we have to open some centres, discard up to @math points of @math and assign every other point to the nearest open centre, minimizing the total assignment cost plus centre opening costs. In @math -Median and @math -Means, we have to open up to @math centres but there are no opening costs. In @math -Means, the cost of assigning @math to @math is @math . We present several results. Our main focus is on cases where @math is a doubling metric or is the shortest path metrics of graphs from a minor-closed family of graphs. For uniform-cost UFL with outliers on such metrics we show that a multiswap simple local search heuristic yields a PTAS. With a bit more work, we extend this to bicriteria approximations for the @math -Median and @math -Means problems in the same metrics where, for any constant @math , we can find a solution using @math centres whose cost is at most a @math -factor of the optimum and uses at most @math outliers. We also show that natural local search heuristics that do not violate the number of clusters and outliers for @math -Median (or @math -Means) will have unbounded gap even in Euclidean metrics. Furthermore, we show how our analysis can be extended to general metrics for @math -Means with outliers to obtain a @math bicriteria. We present new approximation algorithms for the @math -median and @math -means clustering problems. To this end, we obtain small coresets for @math -median and @math -means clustering in general metric spaces and in Euclidean spaces. In @math , these coresets are of size with polynomial dependency on the dimension @math . This leads to @math -approximation algorithms to the optimal @math -median and @math -means clustering in @math , with running time @math , where @math is the number of points. This improves over previous results. We use those coresets to maintain a @math -approximate @math -median and @math -means clustering of a stream of points in @math , using @math space. These are the first streaming algorithms, for those problems, that have space complexity with polynomial dependency on the dimension.