ICML 2020poster6 citations

k-means++: few more steps yield constant approximation

Davin Choo, Christoph Grunau, Julian Portmann, Vaclav Rozhon

Abstract

The k-means++ algorithm of Arthur and Vassilvitskii (SODA 2007) is a state-of-the-art algorithm for solving the k-means clustering problem and is known to give an O(log k) approximation. Recently, Lattanzi and Sohler (ICML 2019) proposed augmenting k-means++ with O(k log log k) local search steps to yield a constant approximation (in expectation) to the k-means clustering problem. In this paper, we improve their analysis to show that, for any arbitrarily small constant epsilon > 0, with only epsilon * k additional local search steps, one can achieve a constant approximation guarantee (with high probability in k), resolving an open problem in their paper.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v119-choo20a,
  title = 	 {k-means++: few more steps yield constant approximation},
  author =       {Choo, Davin and Grunau, Christoph and Portmann, Julian and Rozhon, Vaclav},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning},
  pages = 	 {1909--1917},
  year = 	 {2020},
  editor = 	 {III, Hal Daumé and Singh, Aarti},
  volume = 	 {119},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {13--18 Jul},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/choo20a/choo20a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v119/choo20a.html},
  abstract = 	 {The k-means++ algorithm of Arthur and Vassilvitskii (SODA 2007) is a state-of-the-art algorithm for solving the k-means clustering problem and is known to give an O(log k) approximation. Recently, Lattanzi and Sohler (ICML 2019) proposed augmenting k-means++ with O(k log log k) local search steps to yield a constant approximation (in expectation) to the k-means clustering problem. In this paper, we improve their analysis to show that, for any arbitrarily small constant epsilon > 0, with only epsilon * k additional local search steps, one can achieve a constant approximation guarantee (with high probability in k), resolving an open problem in their paper.}
}
k-means++: few more steps yield constant approximation · ICML 2020