We study the k-center clustering problem under demographic fairness constraints, where the point set is partitioned into groups, and the aim is to compute clusters that exhibit a given group proportion. Previous work in this direction assumes that the entire point set already respects the desired proportions or uses relaxed notions of fairness. In this work, we propose a model that facilitates the creation of clusters that exactly match given target ratios, even when the input point set does not. We combine the well-known fair clustering model initiated by Chierichetti, Kumar, Lattanzi, and Vassilvitskii [Flavio Chierichetti et al., 2017] with the notion of outliers to obtain a practical combinatorial framework that provides constant-factor approximate solutions for all proportion settings from 1:1 for two groups to t₁:t₂:…:t_m for m ≥ 2 groups, where t₁,…,t_m are integers. We implement and evaluate our algorithms, compare different variants, and provide evidence of the practicability of this approach.

We consider the k-min-sum-radii (k-MSR) clustering problem with fairness constraints. The k-min-sum-radii problem is a mixture of the classical k-center and k-median problems. We are given a set of points P in a metric space and a number k and aim to partition the points into k clusters, each of the clusters having one designated center. The objective to minimize is the sum of the radii of the k clusters (where in k-center we would only consider the maximum radius and in k-median we would consider the sum of the individual points’ costs). Various notions of fair clustering have been introduced lately, and we follow the definitions due to Chierichetti et al. [13] which demand that cluster compositions shall follow the proportions of the input point set with respect to some given sensitive attribute. For the easier case where the sensitive attribute only has two possible values and each is equally frequent in the input, the aim is to compute a clustering where all clusters have a 1:1 ratio with respect to this attribute. We call this the 1:1 case. There has been a surge of FPT-approximation algorithms for the k-MSR problem lately, solving the problem both in the unconstrained case and in several constrained problem variants. We add to this research area by designing an FPT (6 + ϵ)-approximation that works for k-MSR under the mentioned general fairness notion. For the special 1:1 case, we improve our algorithm to achieve a (3 + ϵ)-approximation.

As a major unsupervised learning method, clustering has received a lot of attention over multiple decades. The various clustering problems that have been studied intensively include, e.g., the $k$-means problem and the $k$-center problem. However, in applications, it is common that good clusterings should optimize multiple objectives (e.g., visualizing data on a map by clustering districts into areas that are both geographically compact but also homogeneous with respect to the data). We study combinations of different objectives, for example optimizing $k$-center and $k$-means simultaneously or optimizing $k$-center with respect to two different metrics. Usually these objectives are conflicting and cannot be optimized simultaneously, making it necessary to find trade-offs. We develop novel algorithms for computing the set of Pareto-optimal solutions (approximately) for various combinations of two objectives. Our algorithms achieve provable approximation guarantees and we demonstrate in several experiments that the (approximate) Pareto set contains good clusterings that cannot be found by considering one of the objectives separately.

The metric $k$-center clustering problem with $z$ outliers, also known as $(k,z)$-center clustering, involves clustering a given point set $P$ in a metric space $(M,d)$ using at most $k$ balls, minimizing the maximum ball radius while excluding up to $z$ points from the clustering. This problem holds fundamental significance in various domains such as machine learning, data mining, and database systems. This paper addresses the fully dynamic version of the problem, where the point set undergoes continuous updates (insertions and deletions) over time. The objective is to maintain an approximate $(k,z)$-center clustering with efficient update times. We propose a novel fully dynamic algorithm that maintains a $(4+\epsilon)$-approximate solution to the $(k,z)$-center clustering problem that covers all but at most $(1+\epsilon)z$ points at any time in the sequence with probability $1-k/e^{\Omega(\log k)}$. The algorithm achieves an expected amortized update time of $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2} k^6\log(k) \log(\Delta))$, and is applicable to general metric spaces. Our dynamic algorithm presents a significant improvement over the recent dynamic $(14+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithm by Chan, Lattanzi, Sozio, and Wang for this problem.

Abstract Motivated by an application from geodesy, we study the connected k-center problem and the connected k-diameter problem. The former problem has been introduced by Ge et al. (ACM Trans Knowl Discov Data 2(2):1–35, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1145/1376815.1376816 ) to model clustering of data sets with both attribute and relationship data. These problems arise from the classical k-center and k-diameter problems by adding a side constraint. For the side constraint, we are given an undirected connectivity graphG on the input points, and a clustering is now only feasible if every cluster induces a connected subgraph in G. Usually in clustering problems one assumes that the clusters are pairwise disjoint. We study this case but additionally also the case that clusters are allowed to be non-disjoint. This can help to satisfy the connectivity constraints. Our main result is an $$O(\log ^2k)$$ O ( log 2 k ) -approximation algorithm for the disjoint connected k-center and k-diameter problem. For Euclidean spaces of constant dimension and for metrics with constant doubling dimension, the approximation factor improves to O(1). Our algorithm works by computing a non-disjoint connected clustering first and transforming it into a disjoint connected clustering. We complement these upper bounds by several upper and lower bounds for variations and special cases of the model.

Abstract In a hierarchical clustering problem the task is to compute a series of mutually compatible clusterings of a finite metric space $$(P,{{\,\textrm{dist}\,}})$$ ( P , dist ) . Starting with the clustering where every point forms its own cluster, one iteratively merges two clusters until only one cluster remains. Complete linkage is a well-known and popular algorithm to compute such clusterings: in every step it merges the two clusters whose union has the smallest radius (or diameter) among all currently possible merges. We prove that the radius (or diameter) of every k-clustering computed by complete linkage is at most by factor O(k) (or $$O(k^{\ln (3)/\ln (2)})=O(k^{1{.}59})$$ O ( k ln ( 3 ) / ln ( 2 ) ) = O ( k 1.59 ) ) worse than an optimal k-clustering minimizing the radius (or diameter). Furthermore we give a negative answer to the question proposed by Dasgupta and Long (J Comput Syst Sci 70(4):555–569, 2005. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcss.2004.10.006 ), who show a lower bound of $$\Omega (\log (k))$$ Ω ( log ( k ) ) and ask if the approximation guarantee is in fact $$\Theta (\log (k))$$ Θ ( log ( k ) ) . We present instances where complete linkage performs poorly in the sense that the k-clustering computed by complete linkage is off by a factor of $$\Omega (k)$$ Ω ( k ) from an optimal solution for radius and diameter. We conclude that in general metric spaces complete linkage does not perform asymptotically better than single linkage, merging the two clusters with smallest inter-cluster distance, for which we prove an approximation guarantee of O(k).

Motivated by an application from geodesy, we introduce a novel clustering problem which is a $k$-center (or k-diameter) problem with a side constraint. For the side constraint, we are given an undirected connectivity graph $G$ on the input points, and a clustering is now only feasible if every cluster induces a connected subgraph in $G$. We call the resulting problems the connected $k$-center problem and the connected $k$-diameter problem. We prove several results on the complexity and approximability of these problems. Our main result is an $O(\log^2{k})$-approximation algorithm for the connected $k$-center and the connected $k$-diameter problem. For Euclidean metrics and metrics with constant doubling dimension, the approximation factor of this algorithm improves to $O(1)$. We also consider the special cases that the connectivity graph is a line or a tree. For the line we give optimal polynomial-time algorithms and for the case that the connectivity graph is a tree, we either give an optimal polynomial-time algorithm or a $2$-approximation algorithm for all variants of our model. We complement our upper bounds by several lower bounds.

Given a point set $P\subseteq M$ from a metric space $(M,d)$ and numbers $k, z \in N$, the *metric $k$-center problem with $z$ outliers* is to find a set $C^\ast\subseteq P$ of $k$ points such that the maximum distance of all but at most $z$ outlier points of $P$ to their nearest center in ${C}^\ast$ is minimized. We consider this problem in the fully dynamic model, i.e., under insertions and deletions of points, for the case that the metric space has a bounded doubling dimension $dim$. We utilize a hierarchical data structure to maintain the points and their neighborhoods, which enables us to efficiently find the clusters. In particular, our data structure can be queried at any time to generate a $(3+\varepsilon)$-approximate solution for input values of $k$ and $z$ in worst-case query time $\varepsilon^{-O(dim)}k \log{n} \log\log{\Delta}$, where $\Delta$ is the ratio between the maximum and minimum distance between two points in $P$. Moreover, it allows insertion/deletion of a point in worst-case update time $\varepsilon^{-O(dim)}\log{n}\log{\Delta}$. Our result achieves a significantly faster query time with respect to $k$ and $z$ than the current state-of-the-art by Pellizzoni, Pietracaprina, and Pucci, which uses $\varepsilon^{-O(dim)}(k+z)^2\log{\Delta}$ query time to obtain a $(3+\varepsilon)$-approximation.

We study $k$-clustering problems with lower bounds, including $k$-median and $k$-means clustering with lower bounds. In addition to the point set $P$ and the number of centers $k$, a $k$-clustering problem with (uniform) lower bounds gets a number $B$. The solution space is restricted to clusterings where every cluster has at least $B$ points. We demonstrate how to approximate $k$-median with lower bounds via a reduction to facility location with lower bounds, for which $O(1)$-approximation algorithms are known. Then we propose a new constrained clustering problem with lower bounds where we allow points to be assigned multiple times (to different centers). This means that for every point, the clustering specifies a set of centers to which it is assigned. We call this clustering with weak lower bounds. We give a $(6.5+ε)$-approximation for $k$-median clustering with weak lower bounds and an $O(1)$-approximation for $k$-means with weak lower bounds. We conclude by showing that at a constant increase in the approximation factor, we can restrict the number of assignments of every point to $2$ (or, if we allow fractional assignments, to $1+ε$). This also leads to the first bicritera approximation algorithm for $k$-means with (standard) lower bounds where bicriteria is interpreted in the sense that the lower bounds are violated by a constant factor. All algorithms in this paper run in time that is polynomial in $n$ and $k$ (and $d$ for the Euclidean variants considered).

The k-means++ algorithm due to Arthur and Vassilvitskii [David Arthur and Sergei Vassilvitskii, 2007] has become the most popular seeding method for Lloyd’s algorithm. It samples the first center uniformly at random from the data set and the other k-1 centers iteratively according to D²-sampling, i.e., the probability that a data point becomes the next center is proportional to its squared distance to the closest center chosen so far. k-means++ is known to achieve an approximation factor of 𝒪(log k) in expectation. Already in the original paper on k-means++, Arthur and Vassilvitskii suggested a variation called greedy k-means++ algorithm in which in each iteration multiple possible centers are sampled according to D²-sampling and only the one that decreases the objective the most is chosen as a center for that iteration. It is stated as an open question whether this also leads to an 𝒪(log k)-approximation (or even better). We show that this is not the case by presenting a family of instances on which greedy k-means++ yields only an Ω(𝓁⋅log k)-approximation in expectation where 𝓁 is the number of possible centers that are sampled in each iteration. Inspired by the negative results, we study a variation of greedy k-means++ which we call noisy k-means++ algorithm. In this variation only one center is sampled in every iteration but not exactly by D²-sampling. Instead in each iteration an adversary is allowed to change the probabilities arising from D²-sampling individually for each point by a factor between 1-ε₁ and 1+ε₂ for parameters ε₁ ∈ [0,1) and ε₂ ≥ 0. We prove that noisy k-means++ computes an 𝒪(log² k)-approximation in expectation. We use the analysis of noisy k-means++ to design a moderately greedy k-means++ algorithm.

We develop and analyze a method to reduce the size of a very large set of data points in a high-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$ to a small set of weighted points such that the result of a predetermined data analysis task on the reduced set is approximately the same as that for the original point set. For example, computing the first $k$ principal components of the reduced set will return approximately the first $k$ principal components of the original set or computing the centers of a $k$-means clustering on the reduced set will return an approximation for the original set. Such a reduced set is also known as a coreset. The main new feature of our construction is that the cardinality of the reduced set is independent of the dimension $d$ of the input space and that the sets are mergeable [P. K. Agarwal et al., Proceedings of the 31 st ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGAI Symposium on Principals of Database Systems, 2012, pp. 23--34]. The latter property means that the union of two reduced sets is a reduced set for the union of the two original sets. It allows us to turn our methods into streaming or distributed algorithms using standard approaches. For problems such as $k$-means and subspace approximation the coreset sizes are also independent of the number of input points. Our method is based on data-dependently projecting the points on a low-dimensional subspace and reducing the cardinality of the points inside this subspace using known methods. The proposed approach works for a wide range of data analysis techniques including $k$-means clustering, principal component analysis, and subspace clustering. The main conceptual contribution is a new coreset definition that allows charging costs that appear for every solution to an additive constant.

Clustering is a fundamental tool in data mining. It partitions points into groups (clusters) and may be used to make decisions for each point based on its group. However, this process may harm protected (minority) classes if the clustering algorithm does not adequately represent them in desirable clusters -- especially if the data is already biased. At NIPS 2017, Chierichetti et al. proposed a model for fair clustering requiring the representation in each cluster to (approximately) preserve the global fraction of each protected class. Restricting to two protected classes, they developed both a 4-approximation for the fair $k$-center problem and a $O(t)$-approximation for the fair $k$-median problem, where $t$ is a parameter for the fairness model. For multiple protected classes, the best known result is a 14-approximation for fair $k$-center. We extend and improve the known results. Firstly, we give a 5-approximation for the fair $k$-center problem with multiple protected classes. Secondly, we propose a relaxed fairness notion under which we can give bicriteria constant-factor approximations for all of the classical clustering objectives $k$-center, $k$-supplier, $k$-median, $k$-means and facility location. The latter approximations are achieved by a framework that takes an arbitrary existing unfair (integral) solution and a fair (fractional) LP solution and combines them into an essentially fair clustering with a weakly supervised rounding scheme. In this way, a fair clustering can be established belatedly, in a situation where the centers are already fixed.

We study Ward's method for the hierarchical k-means problem. This popular greedy heuristic is based on the complete linkage paradigm: Starting with all data points as singleton clusters, it successively merges two clusters to form a clustering with one cluster less. The pair of clusters is chosen to (locally) minimize the k-means cost of the clustering in the next step. Complete linkage algorithms are very popular for hierarchical clustering problems, yet their theoretical properties have been studied relatively little. For the Euclidean k-center problem, Ackermann et al. [1] show that the k-clustering in the hierarchy computed by complete linkage has a worst-case approximation ratio of Θ(log k). If the data lies in ℝd for constant dimension d, the guarantee improves to O(1) [23], but the O-notation hides a linear dependence on d. Complete linkage for k-median or k-means has not been analyzed so far. In this paper, we show that Ward's method computes a 2-approximation with respect to the k-means objective function if the optimal k-clustering is well separated. If additionally the optimal clustering also satisfies a balance condition, then Ward's method fully recovers the optimum solution. These results hold in arbitrary dimension. We accompany our positive results with a lower bound of Ω((3/2)d) for data sets in ℝd that holds if no separation is guaranteed, and with lower bounds when the guaranteed separation is not sufficiently strong. Finally, we show that Ward produces an O(1)-approximative clustering for one-dimensional data sets.

The $k$-center problem is a classical combinatorial optimization problem which asks to find $k$ centers such that the maximum distance of any input point in a set $P$ to its assigned center is minimized. The problem allows for elegant $2$-approximations. However, the situation becomes significantly more difficult when constraints are added to the problem. We raise the question whether general methods can be derived to turn an approximation algorithm for a clustering problem with some constraints into an approximation algorithm that respects one constraint more. Our constraint of choice is privacy: Here, we are asked to only open a center when at least $\ell$ clients will be assigned to it. We show how to combine privacy with several other constraints.

In the Steiner Forest problem, we are given a graph and a collection of source-sink pairs, and the goal is to find a subgraph of minimum total length such that all pairs are connected. The problem is APX-Hard and can be 2-approximated by, e.g., the elegant primal-dual algorithm of Agrawal, Klein, and Ravi from 1995. We give a local-search-based constant-factor approximation for the problem. Local search brings in new techniques to an area that has for long not seen any improvements and might be a step towards a combinatorial algorithm for the more general survivable network design problem. Moreover, local search was an essential tool to tackle the dynamic MST/Steiner Tree problem, whereas dynamic Steiner Forest is still wide open. It is easy to see that any constant factor local search algorithm requires steps that add/drop many edges together. We propose natural local moves which, at each step, either (a) add a shortest path in the current graph and then drop a bunch of inessential edges, or (b) add a set of edges to the current solution. This second type of moves is motivated by the potential function we use to measure progress, combining the cost of the solution with a penalty for each connected component. Our carefully-chosen local moves and potential function work in tandem to eliminate bad local minima that arise when using more traditional local moves. Our analysis first considers the case where the local optimum is a single tree, and shows optimality w.r.t. moves that add a single edge (and drop a set of edges) is enough to bound the locality gap. For the general case, we show how to "project" the optimal solution onto the different trees of the local optimum without incurring too much cost (and this argument uses optimality w.r.t. both kinds of moves), followed by a tree-by-tree argument. We hope both the potential function, and our analysis techniques will be useful to develop and analyze local-search algorithms in other contexts.

In the aversion k-clustering problem, given a metric space, we want to cluster the points into k clusters. The cost incurred by each point is the distance to the furthest point in its cluster, and the cost of the clustering is the sum of all these per-point-costs. This problem is motivated by questions in generating automatic abstractions of extensive-form games. We reduce this problem to a "local" k-median problem where each facility has a prescribed radius and can only connect to clients within that radius. Our main results is a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the aversion k-clustering problem via the local k-median problem. We use a primal-dual approach; our technical contribution is a non-local rounding step which we feel is of broader interest.

We prove that the sum of the squared Euclidean distances from the n rows of an n × d matrix A to any compact set that is spanned by k vectors in ℝd can be approximated up to (1+ε)-factor, for an arbitrary small ε > 0, using the O(k/ε2)-rank approximation of A and a constant. This implies, for example, that the optimal k-means clustering of the rows of A is (1 + ε)-approximated by an optimal k-means clustering of their projection on the O(k/ε2) first right singular vectors (principle components) of A. A (j, k)-coreset for projective clustering is a small set of points that yields a (1 + ε)-approximation to the sum of squared distances from the n rows of A to any set of k affine subspaces, each of dimension at most j. Our embedding yields (0, k)-coresets of size (k) for handling k-means queries, (j, 1)-coresets of size (j) for PCA queries, and (j, k)-coresets of size (log n) (jk) for any j, k ≥ 1 and constant ε ∊ (0, 1/2). Previous coresets usually have a size which is linearly or even exponentially dependent of d, which makes them useless when d ∼ n. Using our coresets with the merge-and-reduce approach, we obtain embarrassingly parallel streaming algorithms for problems such as k-means, PCA and projective clustering. These algorithms use update time per point and memory that is polynomial in log n and only linear in d. For cost functions other than squared Euclidean distances we suggest a simple recursive coreset construction that produces coresets of size for k-means and a special class of bregman divergences that is less dependent on the properties of the squared Euclidean distance.

March 01 2009 Ingo Wegener In Special Collection: CogNet Thomas Jansen, Thomas Jansen Ingo Wegener's group, Technische Universität Dortmund Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Melanie Schmidt, Melanie Schmidt Ingo Wegener's group, Technische Universität Dortmund Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Dirk Sudholt, Dirk Sudholt Ingo Wegener's group, Technische Universität Dortmund Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Carsten Witt, Carsten Witt Ingo Wegener's group, Technische Universität Dortmund Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Christine Zarges Christine Zarges Ingo Wegener's group, Technische Universität Dortmund Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Thomas Jansen Ingo Wegener's group, Technische Universität Dortmund Melanie Schmidt Ingo Wegener's group, Technische Universität Dortmund Dirk Sudholt Ingo Wegener's group, Technische Universität Dortmund Carsten Witt Ingo Wegener's group, Technische Universität Dortmund Christine Zarges Ingo Wegener's group, Technische Universität Dortmund Online Issn: 1530-9304 Print Issn: 1063-6560 © 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2009 Evolutionary Computation (2009) 17 (1): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1162/evco.2009.17.1.1 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Thomas Jansen, Melanie Schmidt, Dirk Sudholt, Carsten Witt, Christine Zarges; Ingo Wegener. Evol Comput 2009; 17 (1): 1–2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/evco.2009.17.1.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsEvolutionary Computation Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2009 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.