The k-means method is one of the most widely used clustering algorithms, drawing its popularity from its speed in practice. Recently, however, it was shown to have exponential worst-case running time. In order to close the gap between practical performance and theoretical analysis, the k-means method has been studied in the model of smoothed analysis. But even the smoothed analyses so far are unsatisfactory as the bounds are still super-polynomial in the number n of data points. In this paper, we settle the smoothed running time of the k-means method. We show that the smoothed number of iterations is bounded by a polynomial in n and 1 , where is the standard deviation of the Gaussian perturbations. This means that if an arbitrary input data set is randomly perturbed, then the k-means method will run in expected polynomial time on that input set.
In an attempt to reconcile theory and practice, Arthur and Vassilvitskii @cite_9 performed the first smoothed analysis of the @math -means method: If the data points are perturbed by Gaussian perturbations of standard deviation @math , then the smoothed number of iterations is polynomial in @math , @math , the diameter of the point set, and @math . However, this bound is still super-polynomial in the number @math of data points. They conjectured that @math -means has indeed polynomial smoothed running time, i.e., that the smoothed number of iterations is bounded by some polynomial in @math and @math .
@cite_9
2949173273 2034380011 2099119387 2034053794
The k-means method is a widely used clustering algorithm. One of its distinguished features is its speed in practice. Its worst-case running-time, however, is exponential, leaving a gap between practical and theoretical performance. Arthur and Vassilvitskii (FOCS 2006) aimed at closing this gap, and they proved a bound of @math on the smoothed running-time of the k-means method, where n is the number of data points and @math is the standard deviation of the Gaussian perturbation. This bound, though better than the worst-case bound, is still much larger than the running-time observed in practice. We improve the smoothed analysis of the k-means method by showing two upper bounds on the expected running-time of k-means. First, we prove that the expected running-time is bounded by a polynomial in @math and @math . Second, we prove an upper bound of @math , where d is the dimension of the data space. The polynomial is independent of k and d, and we obtain a polynomial bound for the expected running-time for @math . Finally, we show that k-means runs in smoothed polynomial time for one-dimensional instances. We show a worst-case lower bound and a smoothed upper bound on the number of iterations performed by the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. First proposed by Besl and McKay, the algorithm is widely used in computational geometry, where it is known for its simplicity and its observed speed. The theoretical study of ICP was initiated by Ezra, Sharir, and Efrat, who showed that the worst-case running time to align two sets of @math points in @math is between @math and @math . We substantially tighten this gap by improving the lower bound to @math . To help reconcile this bound with the algorithm's observed speed, we also show that the smoothed complexity of ICP is polynomial, independent of the dimensionality of the data. Using similar methods, we improve the best known smoothed upper bound for the popular k-means method to @math , once again independent of the dimension. We study the performance of a family of randomized parallel coordinate descent methods for minimizing the sum of a nonsmooth and separable convex functions. The problem class includes as a special case L1-regularized L1 regression and the minimization of the exponential loss ("AdaBoost problem"). We assume the input data defining the loss function is contained in a sparse @math matrix @math with at most @math nonzeros in each row. Our methods need @math iterations to find an approximate solution with high probability, where @math is the number of processors and @math for the fastest variant. The notation hides dependence on quantities such as the required accuracy and confidence levels and the distance of the starting iterate from an optimal point. Since @math is a decreasing function of @math , the method needs fewer iterations when more processors are used. Certain variants of our algorithms perform on average only @math arithmetic operations during a single iteration per processor and, because @math decreases when @math does, fewer iterations are needed for sparser problems. We introduce the smoothed analysis of algorithms, which continuously interpolates between the worst-case and average-case analyses of algorithms. In smoothed analysis, we measure the maximum over inputs of the expected performance of an algorithm under small random perturbations of that input. We measure this performance in terms of both the input size and the magnitude of the perturbations. We show that the simplex algorithm has smoothed complexity polynomial in the input size and the standard deviation of Gaussian perturbations.