We introduce a novel criterion in clustering that seeks clusters with limited
This content will become publicly available on March 25, 2025
Approximation Scheme for Weighted Metric Clustering via Sherali-Adams
Motivated by applications to classification problems on metric data, we study Weighted Metric Clustering problem: given a metric d over n points and a k x k symmetric matrix A with non-negative entries, the goal is to find a k-partition of these points into clusters C1,...,Ck, while minimizing the sum of A[i,j] * d(u,v) over all pairs of clusters Ci and Cj and all pairs of points u from Ci and v from Cj. Specific choices of A lead to Weighted Metric Clustering capturing well-studied graph partitioning problems in metric spaces, such as Min-Uncut, Min-k-Sum, Min-k-Cut, and more.Our main result is that Weighted Metric Clustering admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS). Our algorithm handles all the above problems using the Sherali-Adams linear programming relaxation. This subsumes several prior works, unifies many of the techniques for various metric clustering objectives, and yields a PTAS for several new problems, including metric clustering on manifolds and a new family of hierarchical clustering objectives. Our experiments on the hierarchical clustering objective show that it better captures the ground-truth structural information compared to the popular Dasgupta's objective.
more » « less- Award ID(s):
- 1955351
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10519129
- Publisher / Repository:
- Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
- Volume:
- 38
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 2159-5399
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 7926 to 7934
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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