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.
In a maximum-r-constraint satisfaction problem with variables x1, x2, ... ,xn , we are given Boolean functions f1, f2, ..., fm each involving r of the n variables and are to find the maximum number of these functions that can be made true by a truth assignment to the variables. We show that for r fixed, there is an integer q ∈ O(log(1 e) e4) such that if we choose q variables (uniformly) at random, the answer to the subproblem induced on the chosen variables is, with high probability, within an additive error of eqr of qr nr times the answer to the original n-variable problem. The previous best result for the case of r = 2 (which includes many graph problems) was that there is an algorithm which given the induced sub-problem on q = O(1 e5) variables, can find an approximation to the answer to the whole problem within additive error en2. For r≥3, the conference version of this paper (in: Proceedings of the 34th ACM STOC, ACM, New York, 2002, pp. 232-239) and independently Andersson and Engebretsen give the first results with sample complexity q dependent only polynomially upon 1 e. Their algorithm has a sample complexity q of O(1 e7). They (as also the earlier papers) however do not directly prove any relation between the answer to the sub-problem and the whole problem as we do here. Our method also differs from other results in that it is linear algebraic, rather than combinatorial in nature.