A Unified Framework for Clustering Constrained Data Without Locality Property

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a class of constrained clustering problems of points in $$\mathbb {R}^{d}$$, where d could be rather high. A common feature of these problems is that their optimal clusterings no longer have the locality property (due to the additional constraints), which is a key property required by many algorithms for their unconstrained counterparts. To overcome the difficulty caused by the loss of locality, we present in this paper a unified framework, called Peeling-and-Enclosing, to iteratively solve two variants of the constrained clustering problems, constrained k-means clustering (k-CMeans) and constrained k-median clustering (k-CMedian). Our framework generalizes Kumar et al.’s (J ACM 57(2):5, 2010) elegant k-means clustering approach from unconstrained data to constrained data, and is based on two standalone geometric techniques, called Simplex Lemma and Weaker Simplex Lemma, for k-CMeans and k-CMedian, respectively. The simplex lemma (or weaker simplex lemma) enables us to efficiently approximate the mean (or median) point of an unknown set of points by searching a small-size grid, independent of the dimensionality of the space, in a simplex (or the surrounding region of a simplex), and thus can be used to handle high dimensional data. If k and $$\frac{1}{\epsilon }$$ are fixed numbers, our framework generates, in nearly linear time (i.e., $$O(n(\log n)^{k+1}d)$$), $$O((\log n)^{k})$$k-tuple candidates for the k mean or median points, and one of them induces a $$(1+\epsilon )$$-approximation for k-CMeans or k-CMedian, where n is the number of points. Combining this unified framework with a problem-specific selection algorithm (which determines the best k-tuple candidate), we obtain a $$(1+\epsilon )$$-approximation for each of the constrained clustering problems. Our framework improves considerably the best known results for these problems. We expect that our technique will be applicable to other variants of k-means and k-median clustering problems without locality.