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.
Since then, there has been only partial success in proving the conjecture. Manthey and R "oglin improved the smoothed running time bound by devising two bounds @cite_24 : The first is polynomial in @math and @math . The second is @math , where the degree of the polynomial is independent of @math and @math . Additionally, they proved a polynomial bound for the smoothed running time of @math -means on one-dimensional instances.
@cite_24
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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.