Faster Clustering via Preprocessing

Abstract

We examine the efficiency of clustering a set of points, when the encompassing metric space may be preprocessed in advance. In computational problems of this genre, there is a first stage of preprocessing, whose input is a collection of points $M$; the next stage receives as input a query set $Q\subset M$, and should report a clustering of $Q$ according to some objective, such as 1-median, in which case the answer is a point $a\in M$ minimizing ${\sum }_{q\in Q}{d}_M(a,q)$. We design fast algorithms that approximately solve such problems under standard clustering objectives like $p$-center and $p$-median, when the metric $M$ has low doubling dimension. By leveraging the preprocessing stage, our algorithms achieve query time that is near-linear in the query size $n=|Q|$, and is (almost) independent of the total number of points $m=|M|$.

24 pages

References in corpus (1)

• Fast Construction of Nets in Low Dimensional Metrics, and Their Applications