Correlation clustering is perhaps the most natural formulation of clustering. Given @math objects and a pairwise similarity measure, the goal is to cluster the objects so that, to the best possible extent, similar objects are put in the same cluster and dissimilar objects are put in different clusters. Despite its theoretical appeal, the practical relevance of correlation clustering still remains largely unexplored, mainly due to the fact that correlation clustering requires the @math pairwise similarities as input. In this paper we initiate the investigation into algorithms for correlation clustering. In we are given the identifier of a single object and we want to return the cluster to which it belongs in some globally consistent near-optimal clustering, using a small number of similarity queries. Local algorithms for correlation clustering open the door to algorithms, which are particularly useful when the similarity between items is costly to compute, as it is often the case in many practical application domains. They also imply @math distributed and streaming clustering algorithms, @math constant-time estimators and testers for cluster edit distance, and @math property-preserving parallel reconstruction algorithms for clusterability. Specifically, we devise a local clustering algorithm attaining a @math -approximation in time @math independently of the dataset size. An explicit approximate clustering for all objects can be produced in time @math (which is provably optimal). We also provide a fully additive @math -approximation with local query complexity @math and time complexity @math . The latter yields the fastest polynomial-time approximation scheme for correlation clustering known to date.
The literature on also contains algorithms with sublinear query complexity (see, e.g., @cite_42 ); many of them are heuristic or do not apply to correlation clustering. Ailon @cite_3 obtain algorithms for @math with sublinear query complexity, but the running time of their solutions is exponential in @math .
@cite_42 @cite_3
2160066096 2950197242
Active data clustering is a novel technique for clustering of proximity data which utilizes principles from sequential experiment design in order to interleave data generation and data analysis. The proposed active data sampling strategy is based on the expected value of information, a concept rooting in statistical decision theory. This is considered to be an important step towards the analysis of large-scale data sets, because it offers a way to overcome the inherent data sparseness of proximity data. We present applications to unsupervised texture segmentation in computer vision and information retrieval in document databases. The disagreement coefficient of Hanneke has become a central data independent invariant in proving active learning rates. It has been shown in various ways that a concept class with low complexity together with a bound on the disagreement coefficient at an optimal solution allows active learning rates that are superior to passive learning ones. We present a different tool for pool based active learning which follows from the existence of a certain uniform version of low disagreement coefficient, but is not equivalent to it. In fact, we present two fundamental active learning problems of significant interest for which our approach allows nontrivial active learning bounds. However, any general purpose method relying on the disagreement coefficient bounds only fails to guarantee any useful bounds for these problems. The tool we use is based on the learner's ability to compute an estimator of the difference between the loss of any hypotheses and some fixed "pivotal" hypothesis to within an absolute error of at most @math times the