In this paper, we investigate the learning-augmented k-median clustering problem, which aims to improve the performance of traditional clustering algorithms by preprocessing the point set with a predictor of error rate α ∈ [0,1). This preprocessing step assigns potential labels to the points before clustering. We introduce an algorithm for this problem based on a simple yet effective sampling method, which substantially improves upon the time complexities of existing algorithms. Moreover, we mitigate their exponential dependency on the dimensionality of the Euclidean space. Lastly, we conduct experiments to compare our method with several state-of-the-art learning-augmented k-median clustering methods. The experimental results suggest that our proposed approach can significantly reduce the computational complexity in practice, while achieving a lower clustering cost.

The fairness of clustering algorithms has gained widespread attention across various areas, including machine learning, In this paper, we study fair $k$-means clustering in Euclidean space. Given a dataset comprising several groups, the fairness constraint requires that each cluster should contain a proportion of points from each group within specified lower and upper bounds. Due to these fairness constraints, determining the optimal locations of $k$ centers is a quite challenging task. We propose a novel ``Relax and Merge'' framework that returns a $(1+4\rho + O(\epsilon))$-approximate solution, where $\rho$ is the approximate ratio of an off-the-shelf vanilla $k$-means algorithm and $O(\epsilon)$ can be an arbitrarily small positive number. If equipped with a PTAS of $k$-means, our solution can achieve an approximation ratio of $(5+O(\epsilon))$ with only a slight violation of the fairness constraints, which improves the current state-of-the-art approximation guarantee. Furthermore, using our framework, we can also obtain a $(1+4\rho +O(\epsilon))$-approximate solution for the $k$-sparse Wasserstein Barycenter problem, which is a fundamental optimization problem in the field of optimal transport, and a $(2+6\rho)$-approximate solution for the strictly fair $k$-means clustering with no violation, both of which are better than the current state-of-the-art methods. In addition, the empirical results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can significantly outperform baseline approaches in terms of clustering cost.

DBSCAN is a popular density-based clustering algorithm that has many different applications in practice. However, the running time of DBSCAN in high-dimensional space or general metric space (\em e.g., clustering a set of texts by using edit distance) can be as large as quadratic in the input size. Moreover, most of existing accelerating techniques for DBSCAN are only available for low-dimensional Euclidean space. In this paper, we study the DBSCAN problem under the assumption that the inliers (the core points and border points) have a low intrinsic dimension (which is a realistic assumption for many high-dimensional applications), where the outliers can locate anywhere in the space without any assumption. First, we propose a k-center clustering based algorithm that can reduce the time-consuming labeling and merging tasks of DBSCAN to be linear. Further, we propose a linear time approximate DBSCAN algorithm, where the key idea is building a novel small-size summary for the core points. Also, our algorithm can be efficiently implemented for streaming data and the required memory is independent of the input size. Finally, we conduct our experiments and compare our algorithms with several popular DBSCAN algorithms. The experimental results suggest that our proposed approach can significantly reduce the computational complexity in practice.