We give a constant factor polynomial time pseudo-approximation algorithm for min-sum clustering with or without outliers. The algorithm is allowed to exclude an arbitrarily small constant fraction of the points. For instance, we show how to compute a solution that clusters 98\% of the input data points and pays no more than a constant factor times the optimal solution that clusters 99\% of the input data points. More generally, we give the following bicriteria approximation: For any $\eps > 0$, for any instance with $n$ input points and for any positive integer $n'\le n$, we compute in polynomial time a clustering of at least $(1-\eps) n'$ points of cost at most a constant factor greater than the optimal cost of clustering $n'$ points. The approximation guarantee grows with $\frac{1}{\eps}$. Our results apply to instances of points in real space endowed with squared Euclidean distance, as well as to points in a metric space, where the number of clusters, and also the dimension if relevant, is arbitrary (part of the input, not an absolute constant).
Clustering with outliers is one of the most fundamental problems in Computer Science. Given a set $X$ of $n$ points and two integers $k$ and $m$, the clustering with outliers aims to exclude $m$ points from $X$ and partition the remaining points into $k$ clusters that minimizes a certain cost function. In this paper, we give a general approach for solving clustering with outliers, which results in a fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) algorithm in $k$ and $m$, that almost matches the approximation ratio for its outlier-free counterpart. As a corollary, we obtain FPT approximation algorithms with o…
This paper considers $k$-means clustering in the presence of noise. It is known that $k$-means clustering is highly sensitive to noise, and thus noise should be removed to obtain a quality solution. A popular formulation of this problem is called $k$-means clustering with outliers. The goal of $k$-means clustering with outliers is to discard up to a specified number $z$ of points as noise/outliers and then find a $k$-means solution on the remaining data. The problem has received significant attention, yet current algorithms with theoretical guarantees suffer from either high running time or in…
We consider clustering problems with {\em non-uniform lower bounds and outliers}, and obtain the {\em first approximation guarantees} for these problems. We have a set $\F$ of facilities with lower bounds $\{L_i\}_{i\in\F}$ and a set $\D$ of clients located in a common metric space $\{c(i,j)\}_{i,j\in\F\cup\D}$, and bounds $k$, $m$. A feasible solution is a pair $\bigl(S\sse\F,σ:\D\mapsto S\cup\{\mathsf{out}\}\bigr)$, where $σ$ specifies the client assignments, such that $|S|\leq k$, $|σ^{-1}(i)|\geq L_i$ for all $i\in S$, and $|σ^{-1}(\mathsf{out})|\leq m$. In the {\em lower-bounded min-sum-o…
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, $k$-median, and $k$-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), $k$-Median, and $k$-Means. In UFL with outliers, we have to open some centres, discard up to $z$ points of $\cal X$ and assign every other point to the nearest o…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Clustering has many important applications in computer science, but real-world datasets often contain outliers. Moreover, the presence of outliers can make the clustering problems to be much more challenging. To reduce the complexities, various sampling methods have been proposed in past years. Namely, we take a small sample (uniformly or non-uniformly) from input and run an existing approximation algorithm on the sample. Comparing with existing non-uniform sampling methods, the uniform sampling approach has several significant benefits. For example, it only needs to read the data in one-pass …
We consider robust clustering problems in $\mathbb{R}^d$, specifically $k$-clustering problems (e.g., $k$-Median and $k$-Means with $m$ outliers, where the cost for a given center set $C \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ aggregates the distances from $C$ to all but the furthest $m$ data points, instead of all points as in classical clustering. We focus on the $ε$-coreset for robust clustering, a small proxy of the dataset that preserves the clustering cost within $ε$-relative error for all center sets. Our main result is an $ε$-coreset of size $O(m + \mathrm{poly}(k ε^{-1}))$ that can be constructed in ne…
We study the classic $k$-means/median clustering, which are fundamental problems in unsupervised learning, in the setting where data are partitioned across multiple sites, and where we are allowed to discard a small portion of the data by labeling them as outliers. We propose a simple approach based on constructing small summary for the original dataset. The proposed method is time and communication efficient, has good approximation guarantees, and can identify the global outliers effectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical algorithm with theoretical guarantees for d…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
In this paper, we study the problem of {\em $k$-center clustering with outliers}. The problem has many important applications in real world, but the presence of outliers can significantly increase the computational complexity. Though a number of methods have been developed in the past decades, it is still quite challenging to design quality guaranteed algorithm with low complexity for this problem. Our idea is inspired by the greedy method, Gonzalez's algorithm, that was developed for solving the ordinary $k$-center clustering problem. Based on some novel observations, we show that a simple ra…
In this paper, we consider two types of robust models of the $k$-median/$k$-means problems: the outlier-version ($k$-MedO/$k$-MeaO) and the penalty-version ($k$-MedP/$k$-MeaP), in which we can mark some points as outliers and discard them. In $k$-MedO/$k$-MeaO, the number of outliers is bounded by a given integer. In $k$-MedP/$k$-MeaP, we do not bound the number of outliers, but each outlier will incur a penalty cost. We develop a new technique to analyze the approximation ratio of local search algorithms for these two problems by introducing an adapted cluster that can capture useful informat…
We consider clustering in the perturbation resilience model that has been studied since the work of Bilu and Linial [ICS, 2010] and Awasthi, Blum and Sheffet [Inf. Proc. Lett., 2012]. A clustering instance $I$ is said to be $α$-perturbation resilient if the optimal solution does not change when the pairwise distances are modified by a factor of $α$ and the perturbed distances satisfy the metric property --- this is the metric perturbation resilience property introduced in Angelidakis et. al. [STOC, 2010] and a weaker requirement than prior models. We make two high-level contributions. 1) We sh…
Metric $k$-center clustering is a fundamental unsupervised learning primitive. Although widely used, this primitive is heavily affected by noise in the data, so that a more sensible variant seeks for the best solution that disregards a given number $z$ of points of the dataset, called outliers. We provide efficient algorithms for this important variant in the streaming model under the sliding window setting, where, at each time step, the dataset to be clustered is the window $W$ of the most recent data items. Our algorithms achieve $O(1)$ approximation and, remarkably, require a working memory…
We study the problem of constructing $\varepsilon$-coresets for the $(k, z)$-clustering problem in a doubling metric $M(X, d)$. An $\varepsilon$-coreset is a weighted subset $S\subseteq X$ with weight function $w : S \rightarrow \mathbb{R}_{\geq 0}$, such that for any $k$-subset $C \in [X]^k$, it holds that $\sum_{x \in S}{w(x) \cdot d^z(x, C)} \in (1 \pm \varepsilon) \cdot \sum_{x \in X}{d^z(x, C)}$. We present an efficient algorithm that constructs an $\varepsilon$-coreset for the $(k, z)$-clustering problem in $M(X, d)$, where the size of the coreset only depends on the parameters $k, z, \v…
The 1-center clustering with outliers problem asks about identifying a prototypical robust statistic that approximates the location of a cluster of points. Given some constant $0 < α< 1$ and $n$ points such that $αn$ of them are in some (unknown) ball of radius $r,$ the goal is to compute a ball of radius $O(r)$ that also contains $αn$ points. This problem can be formulated with the points in a normed vector space such as $\mathbb{R}^d$ or in a general metric space. The problem has a simple randomized solution: a randomly selected point is a correct solution with constant probability, and its …
In this paper, we consider the $k$-center/median/means clustering with outliers problems (or the $(k, z)$-center/median/means problems) in the distributed setting. Most previous distributed algorithms have their communication costs linearly depending on $z$, the number of outliers. Recently Guha et al. overcame this dependence issue by considering bi-criteria approximation algorithms that output solutions with $2z$ outliers. For the case where $z$ is large, the extra $z$ outliers discarded by the algorithms might be too large, considering that the data gathering process might be costly. In thi…
We consider the problem of principal component analysis (PCA) in the presence of outliers. Given a matrix $A$ ($d \times n$) and parameters $k, m$, the goal is to remove a set of at most $m$ columns of $A$ (known as outliers), so as to minimize the rank-$k$ approximation error of the remaining matrix. While much of the work on this problem has focused on recovery of the rank-$k$ subspace under assumptions on the inliers and outliers, we focus on the approximation problem above. Our main result shows that sampling-based methods developed in the outlier-free case give non-trivial guarantees even…
Center-based clustering is a fundamental primitive for data analysis and becomes very challenging for large datasets. In this paper, we focus on the popular $k$-center variant which, given a set $S$ of points from some metric space and a parameter $k<|S|$, requires to identify a subset of $k$ centers in $S$ minimizing the maximum distance of any point of $S$ from its closest center. A more general formulation, introduced to deal with noisy datasets, features a further parameter $z$ and allows up to $z$ points of $S$ (outliers) to be disregarded when computing the maximum distance from the cent…
We give the first outlier-robust efficient algorithm for clustering a mixture of $k$ statistically separated d-dimensional Gaussians (k-GMMs). Concretely, our algorithm takes input an $ε$-corrupted sample from a $k$-GMM and whp in $d^{\text{poly}(k/η)}$ time, outputs an approximate clustering that misclassifies at most $k^{O(k)}(ε+η)$ fraction of the points whenever every pair of mixture components are separated by $1-\exp(-\text{poly}(k/η)^k)$ in total variation (TV) distance. Such a result was not previously known even for $k=2$. TV separation is the statistically weakest possible notion of …
Given a point set $P \subseteq X$ of size $n$ in a metric space $(X,dist)$ of doubling dimension $d$ and two parameters $k \in N$ and $z \in N$, the $k$-center problem with $z$ outliers asks to return a set $C^\ast \subseteq X$ of $k$ centers such that the maximum distance of all but $z$ points of $P$ to their nearest center in $C^\ast$ is minimized. An $(ε,k,z)$-coreset for this problem is a weighted point set $P^*$ such that an optimal solution for the $k$-center problem with $z$ outliers on $P^*$ gives a $(1\pmε)$-approximation for the $k$-center problem with $z$ outliers on $P$. We study t…
We consider the classic Facility Location, $k$-Median, and $k$-Means problems in metric spaces of doubling dimension $d$. We give nearly linear-time approximation schemes for each problem. The complexity of our algorithms is $2^{(\log(1/\eps)/\eps)^{O(d^2)}} n \log^4 n + 2^{O(d)} n \log^9 n$, making a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art algorithms which run in time $n^{(d/\eps)^{O(d)}}$. Moreover, we show how to extend the techniques used to get the first efficient approximation schemes for the problems of prize-collecting $k$-Medians and $k$-Means, and efficient bicriteria appro…
We consider the {\em clustering with diversity} problem: given a set of colored points in a metric space, partition them into clusters such that each cluster has at least $\ell$ points, all of which have distinct colors. We give a 2-approximation to this problem for any $\ell$ when the objective is to minimize the maximum radius of any cluster. We show that the approximation ratio is optimal unless $\mathbf{P=NP}$, by providing a matching lower bound. Several extensions to our algorithm have also been developed for handling outliers. This problem is mainly motivated by applications in privacy-…
We study two generalizations of classic clustering problems called dynamic ordered $k$-median and dynamic $k$-supplier, where the points that need clustering evolve over time, and we are allowed to move the cluster centers between consecutive time steps. In these dynamic clustering problems, the general goal is to minimize certain combinations of the service cost of points and the movement cost of centers, or to minimize one subject to some constraints on the other. We obtain a constant-factor approximation algorithm for dynamic ordered $k$-median under mild assumptions on the input. We give a…
As data volumes continue to grow, clustering and outlier detection algorithms are becoming increasingly time-consuming. Classical index structures for neighbor search are no longer sustainable due to the "curse of dimensionality". Instead, approximated index structures offer a good opportunity to significantly accelerate the neighbor search for clustering and outlier detection and to have the lowest possible error rate in the results of the algorithms. Locality-sensitive hashing is one of those. We indicate directions to model the properties of LSH.
Many real-world problems can be formulated as geometric optimization problems in high dimensions, especially in the fields of machine learning and data mining. Moreover, we often need to take into account of outliers when optimizing the objective functions. However, the presence of outliers could make the problems to be much more challenging than their vanilla versions. In this paper, we study the fundamental minimum enclosing ball (MEB) with outliers problem first; partly inspired by the core-set method from Bădoiu and Clarkson, we propose a sub-linear time bi-criteria approximation algorithm…
The density based clustering method {\em Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN)} is a popular method for outlier recognition and has received tremendous attention from many different areas. A major issue of the original DBSCAN is that the time complexity could be as large as quadratic. Most of existing DBSCAN algorithms focus on developing efficient index structures to speed up the procedure in low-dimensional Euclidean space. However, the research of DBSCAN in high-dimensional Euclidean space or general metric space is still quite limited, to the best of our know…
