Center-based clustering under perturbation stability

From MaRDI portal




Abstract: Clustering under most popular objective functions is NP-hard, even to approximate well, and so unlikely to be efficiently solvable in the worst case. Recently, Bilu and Linial cite{Bilu09} suggested an approach aimed at bypassing this computational barrier by using properties of instances one might hope to hold in practice. In particular, they argue that instances in practice should be stable to small perturbations in the metric space and give an efficient algorithm for clustering instances of the Max-Cut problem that are stable to perturbations of size O(n1/2). In addition, they conjecture that instances stable to as little as O(1) perturbations should be solvable in polynomial time. In this paper we prove that this conjecture is true for any center-based clustering objective (such as k-median, k-means, and k-center). Specifically, we show we can efficiently find the optimal clustering assuming only stability to factor-3 perturbations of the underlying metric in spaces without Steiner points, and stability to factor 2+sqrt3 perturbations for general metrics. In particular, we show for such instances that the popular Single-Linkage algorithm combined with dynamic programming will find the optimal clustering. We also present NP-hardness results under a weaker but related condition.




Cited in
(32)






This page was built for publication: Center-based clustering under perturbation stability

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q763489)