Clustering is a fundamental task in data analysis, and spectral clustering has been recognized as a promising approach to it. Given a graph describing the relationship between data, spectral clustering explores the underlying cluster structure in two stages. The first stage embeds the nodes of the graph into real space, and the second stage groups the embedded nodes into several clusters. The use of the @math -means method in the grouping stage is currently standard practice. We present a spectral clustering algorithm that uses convex programming in the grouping stage, and study how well it works. The concept behind the algorithm design lies in the following observation. The nodes with the largest degree in each cluster may be found by computing an enclosing ellipsoid for embedded nodes in real space, and the clusters may be identified by using those nodes. We show that the observations are valid, and the algorithm returns clusters to provide the conductance of graph, if the gap assumption, introduced by Peng el al. at COLT 2015, is satisfied. We also give an experimental assessment of the algorithm's performance.
We describe the results of in @cite_20 . Let @math be the clusters of an optimal @math -way partition for the conductance problem. We choose an algorithm for solving the minimization problem of @math shown in ) and suppose that the algorithm has an approximation ratio of @math . Let @math be the output of a spectral clustering algorithm that uses a @math -means method based on the @math -approximation algorithm. They showed the following statement in Theorem 1.2 of @cite_20 . Set @math as and suppose that @math is so large that @math . After suitable renumbering of the output of the algorithm, we have Accordingly, if @math , those can be written as Here, the notation @math denotes the symmetric difference of the sets @math and @math . The results tell us that, if @math is large, the difference between @math and @math is small and the conductance of @math is close to that of @math . also developed a nearly linear time algorithm and examined the performance.
@cite_20
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Let @math be a ground set of @math elements, and let @math be a family of subsets of @math , @math , with a positive cost @math associated with each @math . Consider the following online version of the set cover problem, described as a game between an algorithm and an adversary. An adversary gives elements to the algorithm from @math one by one. Once a new element is given, the algorithm has to cover it by some set of @math containing it. We assume that the elements of @math and the members of @math are known in advance to the algorithm; however, the set @math of elements given by the adversary is not known in advance to the algorithm. (In general, @math may be a strict subset of @math .) The objective is to minimize the total cost of the sets chosen by the algorithm. Let @math denote the family of sets in @math that the algorithm chooses. At the end of the game the adversary also produces (offline) a family of sets @math that covers @math . The performance of the algorithm is the ratio between the cost of @math and the cost of @math . The maximum ratio, taken over all input sequences, is the competitive ratio of the algorithm. We present an @math competitive deterministic algorithm for the problem and establish a nearly matching @math lower bound for all interesting values of @math and @math . The techniques used are motivated by similar techniques developed in computational learning theory for online prediction (e.g., the WINNOW algorithm) together with a novel way of converting a fractional solution into a deterministic online algorithm. For input @math , let @math denote the set of outputs that are the "legal" answers for a computational problem @math . Suppose @math and members of @math are so large that there is not time to read them in their entirety. We propose a model of local computation algorithms which for a given input @math , support queries by a user to values of specified locations @math in a legal output @math . When more than one legal output @math exists for a given @math , the local computation algorithm should output in a way that is consistent with at least one such @math . Local computation algorithms are intended to distill the common features of several concepts that have appeared in various algorithmic subfields, including local distributed computation, local algorithms, locally decodable codes, and local reconstruction. We develop a technique, based on known constructions of small sample spaces of @math -wise independent random variables and Beck's analysis in his algorithmic approach to the Lov ' a sz Local Lemma, which under certain conditions can be applied to construct local computation algorithms that run in polylogarithmic time and space. We apply this technique to maximal independent set computations, scheduling radio network broadcasts, hypergraph coloring and satisfying @math -SAT formulas. We consider @math -median clustering in finite metric spaces and @math -means clustering in Euclidean spaces, in the setting where @math is part of the input (not a constant). For the @math -means problem, show that if the optimal @math -means clustering of the input is more expensive than the optimal @math -means clustering by a factor of @math , then one can achieve a @math -approximation to the @math -means optimal in time polynomial in @math and @math by using a variant of Lloyd's algorithm. In this work we substantially improve this approximation guarantee. We show that given only the condition that the @math -means optimal is more expensive than the @math -means optimal by a factor @math for some constant @math , we can obtain a PTAS. In particular, under this assumption, for any @math we achieve a @math -approximation to the @math -means optimal in time polynomial in @math and @math , and exponential in @math and @math . We thus decouple the strength of the assumption from the quality of the approximation ratio. We also give a PTAS for the @math -median problem in finite metrics under the analogous assumption as well. For @math -means, we in addition give a randomized algorithm with improved running time of @math . Our technique also obtains a PTAS under the assumption of that all @math approximations are @math -close to a desired target clustering, in the case that all target clusters have size greater than @math and @math is constant. Note that the motivation of is that for many clustering problems, the objective function is only a proxy for the true goal of getting close to the target. From this perspective, our improvement is that for @math -means in Euclidean spaces we reduce the distance of the clustering found to the target from @math to @math when all target clusters are large, and for @math -median we improve the largeness'' condition needed in the work of to get exactly @math -close from @math to @math . Our results are based on a new notion of clustering stability. We consider the problem of selecting the best subset of exactly @math columns from an @math matrix @math . We present and analyze a novel two-stage algorithm that runs in @math time and returns as output an @math matrix @math consisting of exactly @math columns of @math . In the first (randomized) stage, the algorithm randomly selects @math columns according to a judiciously-chosen probability distribution that depends on information in the top- @math right singular subspace of @math . In the second (deterministic) stage, the algorithm applies a deterministic column-selection procedure to select and return exactly @math columns from the set of columns selected in the first stage. Let @math be the @math matrix containing those @math columns, let @math denote the projection matrix onto the span of those columns, and let @math denote the best rank- @math approximation to the matrix @math . Then, we prove that, with probability at least 0.8, @math This Frobenius norm bound is only a factor of @math worse than the best previously existing existential result and is roughly @math better than the best previous algorithmic result for the Frobenius norm version of this Column Subset Selection Problem (CSSP). We also prove that, with probability at least 0.8, @math This spectral norm bound is not directly comparable to the best previously existing bounds for the spectral norm version of this CSSP. Our bound depends on @math , whereas previous results depend on @math ; if these two quantities are comparable, then our bound is asymptotically worse by a @math factor. We describe a new approximation algorithm for Max Cut. Our algorithm runs in @math time, where @math is the number of vertices, and achieves an approximation ratio of @math . In instances in which an optimal solution cuts a @math fraction of edges, our algorithm finds a solution that cuts a @math fraction of edges. Our main result is a variant of spectral partitioning, which can be implemented in nearly linear time. Given a graph in which the Max Cut optimum is a @math fraction of edges, our spectral partitioning algorithm finds a set @math of vertices and a bipartition @math of @math such that at least a @math fraction of the edges incident on @math have one endpoint in @math and one endpoint in @math . (This can be seen as an analogue of Cheeger's inequality for the smallest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of a graph.) Iterating this procedure yields the approximation results stated above. A different, more complicated, var... A Fixed-Parameter Tractable ( ) @math -approximation algorithm for a minimization (resp. maximization) parameterized problem @math is an FPT algorithm that, given an instance @math computes a solution of cost at most @math (resp. @math ) if a solution of cost at most (resp. at least) @math exists; otherwise the output can be arbitrary. For well-known intractable problems such as the W[1]-hard Clique and W[2]-hard Set Cover problems, the natural question is whether we can get any -approximation. It is widely believed that both Clique and Set-Cover admit no FPT @math -approximation algorithm, for any increasing function @math . Assuming standard conjectures such as the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) eth-paturi and the Projection Games Conjecture (PGC) r3 , we make the first progress towards proving this conjecture by showing that 1. Under the ETH and PGC, there exist constants @math such that the Set Cover problem does not admit an FPT approximation algorithm with ratio @math in @math time, where @math is the size of the universe and @math is the number of sets. 2. Unless @math , for every @math there exists a constant @math such that Clique has no FPT cost approximation with ratio @math in @math time, where @math is the number of vertices in the graph. In the second part of the paper we consider various W[1]-hard problems such as , , Directed Steiner Network and . For all these problem we give polynomial time @math -approximation algorithms for some small function @math (the largest approximation ratio we give is @math ). We study the optimal design problems where the goal is to choose a set of linear measurements to obtain the most accurate estimate of an unknown vector in @math dimensions. We study the @math -optimal design variant where the objective is to minimize the average variance of the error in the maximum likelihood estimate of the vector being measured. The problem also finds applications in sensor placement in wireless networks, sparse least squares regression, feature selection for @math -means clustering, and matrix approximation. In this paper, we introduce proportional volume sampling to obtain improved approximation algorithms for @math -optimal design. Our main result is to obtain improved approximation algorithms for the @math -optimal design problem by introducing the proportional volume sampling algorithm. Our results nearly optimal bounds in the asymptotic regime when the number of measurements done, @math , is significantly more than the dimension @math . We also give first approximation algorithms when @math is small including when @math . The proportional volume-sampling algorithm also gives approximation algorithms for other optimal design objectives such as @math -optimal design and generalized ratio objective matching or improving previous best known results. Interestingly, we show that a similar guarantee cannot be obtained for the @math -optimal design problem. We also show that the @math -optimal design problem is NP-hard to approximate within a fixed constant when @math . We present new approximation algorithms for the @math -median and @math -means clustering problems. To this end, we obtain small coresets for @math -median and @math -means clustering in general metric spaces and in Euclidean spaces. In @math , these coresets are of size with polynomial dependency on the dimension @math . This leads to @math -approximation algorithms to the optimal @math -median and @math -means clustering in @math , with running time @math , where @math is the number of points. This improves over previous results. We use those coresets to maintain a @math -approximate @math -median and @math -means clustering of a stream of points in @math , using @math space. These are the first streaming algorithms, for those problems, that have space complexity with polynomial dependency on the dimension. Let @math , @math for @math , @math bounding the bit length of the coefficients of the @math 's, and let @math be a quantifier-free @math -formula defining a convex semialgebraic set. We design an algorithm returning a rational point in @math if and only if @math . It requires @math bit operations. If a rational point is outputted, its coordinates have bit length dominated by @math . Using this result, we obtain a procedure for deciding whether a polynomial @math is a sum of squares of polynomials in @math . Denote by @math the degree of @math , @math the maximum bit length of the coefficients in @math , @math , and @math . This procedure requires @math bit operations, and the coefficients of the outputted polynomials have bit length dominated by @math . A set of vertices in a graph is a dominating set if every vertex outside the set has a neighbor in the set. The domatic number problem is that of partitioning the vertices of a graph into the maximum number of disjoint dominating sets. Let n denote the number of vertices, @math the minimum degree, and @math the maximum degree. We show that every graph has a domatic partition with @math dominating sets and, moreover, that such a domatic partition can be found in polynomial-time. This implies a @math -approximation algorithm for domatic number, since the domatic number is always at most @math . We also show this to be essentially best possible. Namely, extending the approximation hardness of set cover by combining multiprover protocols with zero-knowledge techniques, we show that for every @math , a @math -approximation implies that @math . This makes domatic number the first natural maximization problem (known to the authors) that is provably approximable to within polylogarithmic factors but no better. We also show that every graph has a domatic partition with @math dominating sets, where the "o(1)" term goes to zero as @math increases. This can be turned into an efficient algorithm that produces a domatic partition of @math sets. The @math -fold direct sum encoding of a string @math is a function @math that takes as input sets @math of size @math and outputs @math . In this paper we prove a direct sum testing theorem. We describe a three query test that accepts with probability one any function of the form @math for some @math and rejects with probability @math functions @math that are @math -far from being a direct sum encoding, where the constant behind the @math notation is independent of @math . This theorem has a couple of additional guises: Linearity testing: By identifying the subsets of @math with vectors in @math in the natural way, our result can be thought of as a linearity testing theorem for functions whose domain is restricted to the @math th layer of the hypercube (i.e., the set of @math -bit strings with Hamming weight @math ). Tensor power testing: By moving to @math notation, the direct sum encoding is equivalent (up to a difference thatis negligi... The @math -means clustering algorithm is a ubiquitous tool in data mining and machine learning that shows promising performance. However, its high computational cost has hindered its applications in broad domains. Researchers have successfully addressed these obstacles with dimensionality reduction methods. Recently, [1] develop a state-of-the-art random projection (RP) method for faster @math -means clustering. Their method delivers many improvements over other dimensionality reduction methods. For example, compared to the advanced singular value decomposition based feature extraction approach, [1] reduce the running time by a factor of @math for data matrix @math with @math data points and @math features, while losing only a factor of one in approximation accuracy. Unfortunately, they still require @math for matrix multiplication and this cost will be prohibitive for large values of @math and @math . To break this bottleneck, we carefully build a sparse embedded @math -means clustering algorithm which requires @math ( @math denotes the number of non-zeros in @math ) for fast matrix multiplication. Moreover, our proposed algorithm improves on [1]'s results for approximation accuracy by a factor of one. Our empirical studies corroborate our theoretical findings, and demonstrate that our approach is able to significantly accelerate @math -means clustering, while achieving satisfactory clustering performance. A set X of points in @math is (k,b)-clusterable if X can be partitioned into k subsets (clusters) so that the diameter (alternatively, the radius) of each cluster is at most b. We present algorithms that, by sampling from a set X, distinguish between the case that X is (k,b)-clusterable and the case that X is @math -far from being (k,b')-clusterable for any given @math and for @math . By @math -far from being (k,b')-clusterable we mean that more than @math points should be removed from X so that it becomes (k,b')-clusterable. We give algorithms for a variety of cost measures that use a sample of size independent of |X| and polynomial in k and @math . Our algorithms can also be used to find approximately good clusterings. Namely, these are clusterings of all but an @math -fraction of the points in X that have optimal (or close to optimal) cost. The benefit of our algorithms is that they construct an implicit representation of such clusterings in time independent of |X|. That is, without actually having to partition all points in X, the implicit representation can be used to answer queries concerning the cluster to which any given point belongs. Motivated by applications in which the data may be formulated as a matrix, we consider algorithms for several common linear algebra problems. These algorithms make more efficient use of computational resources, such as the computation time, random access memory (RAM), and the number of passes over the data, than do previously known algorithms for these problems. In this paper, we devise two algorithms for the matrix multiplication problem. Suppose @math and @math (which are @math and @math , respectively) are the two input matrices. In our main algorithm, we perform @math independent trials, where in each trial we randomly sample an element of @math with an appropriate probability distribution @math on @math . We form an @math matrix @math consisting of the sampled columns of @math , each scaled appropriately, and we form a @math matrix @math using the corresponding rows of @math , again scaled appropriately. The choice of @math and the column and row scaling are crucial features of the algorithm. When these are chosen judiciously, we show that @math is a good approximation to @math . More precisely, we show that @math where @math denotes the Frobenius norm, i.e., @math . This algorithm can be implemented without storing the matrices @math and @math in RAM, provided it can make two passes over the matrices stored in external memory and use @math additional RAM to construct @math and @math . We then present a second matrix multiplication algorithm which is similar in spirit to our main algorithm. In addition, we present a model (the pass-efficient model) in which the efficiency of these and other approximate matrix algorithms may be studied and which we argue is well suited to many applications involving massive data sets. In this model, the scarce computational resources are the number of passes over the data and the additional space and time required by the algorithm. The input matrices may be presented in any order of the entries (and not just row or column order), as is the case in many applications where, e.g., the data has been written in by multiple agents. In addition, the input matrices may be presented in a sparse representation, where only the nonzero entries are written. Let @math be an induced subgraph of the hypercube @math for some @math . We show that if @math is a power of @math then, for sufficiciently large @math , the vertex set of @math can be partitioned into induced copies of @math . This answers a question of Offner. In fact, we prove a stronger statement: if @math is a subset of @math for some @math and if @math is a power of @math , then, for sufficiently large @math , @math can be partitioned into isometric copies of @math . Several algorithms with an approximation guarantee of @math are known for the Set Cover problem, where @math is the number of elements. We study a generalization of the Set Cover problem, called the Partition Set Cover problem. Here, the elements are partitioned into @math , and we are required to cover at least @math elements from each color class @math , using the minimum number of sets. We give a randomized LP-rounding algorithm that is an @math approximation for the Partition Set Cover problem. Here @math denotes the approximation guarantee for a related Set Cover instance obtained by rounding the standard LP. As a corollary, we obtain improved approximation guarantees for various set systems for which @math is known to be sublogarithmic in @math . We also extend the LP rounding algorithm to obtain @math approximations for similar generalizations of the Facility Location type problems. Finally, we show that many of these results are essentially tight, by showing that it is NP-hard to obtain an @math -approximation for any of these problems. We give efficient algorithms for volume sampling, i.e., for picking @math -subsets of the rows of any given matrix with probabilities proportional to the squared volumes of the simplices defined by them and the origin (or the squared volumes of the parallelepipeds defined by these subsets of rows). In other words, we can efficiently sample @math -subsets of @math with probabilities proportional to the corresponding @math by @math principal minors of any given @math by @math positive semi definite matrix. This solves an open problem from the monograph on spectral algorithms by Kannan and Vempala (see Section @math of KV , also implicit in BDM, DRVW ). Our first algorithm for volume sampling @math -subsets of rows from an @math -by- @math matrix runs in @math arithmetic operations (where @math is the exponent of matrix multiplication) and a second variant of it for @math -approximate volume sampling runs in @math arithmetic operations, which is almost linear in the size of the input (i.e., the number of entries) for small @math . Our efficient volume sampling algorithms imply the following results for low-rank matrix approximation: (1) Given @math , in @math arithmetic operations we can find @math of its rows such that projecting onto their span gives a @math -approximation to the matrix of rank @math closest to @math under the Frobenius norm. This improves the @math -approximation of Boutsidis, Drineas and Mahoney BDM and matches the lower bound shown in DRVW . The method of conditional expectations gives a algorithm with the same complexity. The running time can be improved to @math at the cost of losing an extra @math in the approximation factor. (2) The same rows and projection as in the previous point give a @math -approximation to the matrix of rank @math closest to @math under the spectral norm. In this paper, we show an almost matching lower bound of @math , even for @math . Let @math be a partially ordered set. If the Boolean lattice @math can be partitioned into copies of @math for some positive integer @math , then @math must satisfy the following two trivial conditions: (1) the size of @math is a power of @math , (2) @math has a unique maximal and minimal element. Resolving a conjecture of Lonc, it was shown by Gruslys, Leader and Tomon that these conditions are sufficient as well. In this paper, we show that if @math only satisfies condition (2), we can still almost partition @math into copies of @math . We prove that if @math has a unique maximal and minimal element, then there exists a constant @math such that all but at most @math elements of @math can be covered by disjoint copies of @math . We study exact recovery conditions for convex relaxations of point cloud clustering problems, focusing on two of the most common optimization problems for unsupervised clustering: @math -means and @math -median clustering. Motivations for focusing on convex relaxations are: (a) they come with a certificate of optimality, and (b) they are generic tools which are relatively parameter-free, not tailored to specific assumptions over the input. More precisely, we consider the distributional setting where there are @math clusters in @math and data from each cluster consists of @math points sampled from a symmetric distribution within a ball of unit radius. We ask: what is the minimal separation distance between cluster centers needed for convex relaxations to exactly recover these @math clusters as the optimal integral solution? For the @math -median linear programming relaxation we show a tight bound: exact recovery is obtained given arbitrarily small pairwise separation @math between the balls. In other words, the pairwise center separation is @math . Under the same distributional model, the @math -means LP relaxation fails to recover such clusters at separation as large as @math . Yet, if we enforce PSD constraints on the @math -means LP, we get exact cluster recovery at center separation @math . In contrast, common heuristics such as Lloyd's algorithm (a.k.a. the @math -means algorithm) can fail to recover clusters in this setting; even with arbitrarily large cluster separation, k-means++ with overseeding by any constant factor fails with high probability at exact cluster recovery. To complement the theoretical analysis, we provide an experimental study of the recovery guarantees for these various methods, and discuss several open problems which these experiments suggest. Let @math be a graph with a threshold function @math such that @math for every vertex @math of @math , where @math is the degree of @math in @math . Suppose we are given a target set @math . This paper considers the following repetitive process on @math . At time step @math the vertices of @math are colored black and the other vertices are colored white. After that, at each time step @math , the colors of white vertices (if any) are updated according to the following rule. All white vertices @math that have at least @math black neighbors at the time step @math are colored black, and the colors of the other vertices do not change. The process runs until no more white vertices can update colors from white to black. The following optimization problem is called Target Set Selection: Find a target set @math of smallest possible size such that all vertices in @math are black at the end of the process. Such an @math is called an optimal target set for @math under the th...