Dimension Reduction and Coresets for Min-Sum $k$-Clustering

Abstract

The min-sum $k$-clustering problem asks to partition an input of $n$ points into $k$ clusters so as to minimize the total pairwise distance within clusters. It is a natural alternative to center-based objectives when the data is not well captured by a small set of representative points. We study for this problem two standard sketching methods, dimension reduction and coresets, which represent the input more compactly while preserving the min-sum cost of every $k$-partition up to $1\pm\varepsilon$ factor. Our first contribution addresses dimension reduction in Euclidean space. The Johnson-Lindenstrauss (JL) Lemma readily implies that a random linear map to target dimension $t=O(\varepsilon^{-2}\log n)$ preserves, with high probability, the min-sum cost of all $k$-partitions. We show that target dimension $t=O(\varepsilon^{-2}(ddim\cdot\log(1/\varepsilon)+\log k+\log\log n))$ suffices for Euclidean inputs of doubling dimension at most $ddim$, and moreover this bound is nearly optimal. We also show that target dimension $t=O(\varepsilon^{-2}(\log(1/\varepsilon)+\log k+\logΔ))$ suffices for Euclidean inputs of aspect ratio at most $Δ$. Our second contribution is to design the first $\varepsilon$-coreset for metric min-sum $k$-clustering. It is actually a movement-based coreset, has size $(1/\varepsilon)^{O(ddim)} k\log n$ for inputs of doubling dimension at most $ddim$, and can be constructed in randomized near-linear-time. We further use these coresets to design streaming algorithms for the problem.