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Dettaglio pubblicazione

2017, 2017 IEEE 58th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (FOCS), Pages 49-60

On the local structure of stable clustering instances (04b Atto di convegno in volume)

Cohen-Addad Vincent, Schwiegelshohn Chris

We study the classic k-median and k-means clustering objectives in the beyond-worst-case scenario. We consider three well-studied notions of structured data that aim at characterizing real-world inputs: Distribution Stability (introduced by Awasthi, Blum, and Sheffet, FOCS 2010); Spectral Separability (introduced by Kumar and Kannan, FOCS 2010); Perturbation Resilience (introduced by Bilu and Linial, ICS 2010). We prove structural results showing that inputs satisfying at least one of the conditions are inherently local. Namely, for any such input, any local optimum is close both in term of structure and in term of objective value to the global optima. As a corollary we obtain that the widely-used Local Search algorithm has strong performance guarantees for both the tasks of recovering the underlying optimal clustering and obtaining a clustering of small cost. This is a significant step toward understanding the success of local search heuristics in clustering applications.
ISBN: 9781538634646
Gruppo di ricerca: Algorithms and Data Science
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