On Hölder fields clustering

Abstract

Based on n randomly drawn vectors in a Hilbert space, we study the k-means clustering scheme. Here, clustering is performed by computing the Voronoi partition associated with centers that minimize an empirical criterion, called distorsion. The performance of the method is evaluated by comparing the theoretical distorsion of empirical optimal centers to the theoretical optimal distorsion. Our first result states that, provided that the underlying distribution satisfies an exponential moment condition, an upper bound for the above performance criterion is $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ . Then, motivated by a broad range of applications, we focus on the case where the data are real-valued random fields. Assuming that they share a Hölder property in quadratic mean, we construct a numerically simple k-means algorithm based on a discretized version of the data. With a judicious choice of the discretization, we prove that the performance of this algorithm matches the performance of the classical algorithm.