Optimization of Inter-group Criteria for Clustering with Minimum Size Constraints

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Laber, Eduardo S., Murtinho, Lucas
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Laber, Eduardo S.
Murtinho, Lucas
author_facet Laber, Eduardo S.
Murtinho, Lucas
contents Internal measures that are used to assess the quality of a clustering usually take into account intra-group and/or inter-group criteria. There are many papers in the literature that propose algorithms with provable approximation guarantees for optimizing the former. However, the optimization of inter-group criteria is much less understood. Here, we contribute to the state-of-the-art of this literature by devising algorithms with provable guarantees for the maximization of two natural inter-group criteria, namely the minimum spacing and the minimum spanning tree spacing. The former is the minimum distance between points in different groups while the latter captures separability through the cost of the minimum spanning tree that connects all groups. We obtain results for both the unrestricted case, in which no constraint on the clusters is imposed, and for the constrained case where each group is required to have a minimum number of points. Our constraint is motivated by the fact that the popular Single Linkage, which optimizes both criteria in the unrestricted case, produces clusterings with many tiny groups. To complement our work, we present an empirical study with 10 real datasets, providing evidence that our methods work very well in practical settings.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_07091
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Optimization of Inter-group Criteria for Clustering with Minimum Size Constraints
Laber, Eduardo S.
Murtinho, Lucas
Machine Learning
Data Structures and Algorithms
Internal measures that are used to assess the quality of a clustering usually take into account intra-group and/or inter-group criteria. There are many papers in the literature that propose algorithms with provable approximation guarantees for optimizing the former. However, the optimization of inter-group criteria is much less understood. Here, we contribute to the state-of-the-art of this literature by devising algorithms with provable guarantees for the maximization of two natural inter-group criteria, namely the minimum spacing and the minimum spanning tree spacing. The former is the minimum distance between points in different groups while the latter captures separability through the cost of the minimum spanning tree that connects all groups. We obtain results for both the unrestricted case, in which no constraint on the clusters is imposed, and for the constrained case where each group is required to have a minimum number of points. Our constraint is motivated by the fact that the popular Single Linkage, which optimizes both criteria in the unrestricted case, produces clusterings with many tiny groups. To complement our work, we present an empirical study with 10 real datasets, providing evidence that our methods work very well in practical settings.
title Optimization of Inter-group Criteria for Clustering with Minimum Size Constraints
topic Machine Learning
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.07091