Settling Time vs. Accuracy Tradeoffs for Clustering Big Data

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Draganov, Andrew, Saulpic, David, Schwiegelshohn, Chris
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Draganov, Andrew
Saulpic, David
Schwiegelshohn, Chris
author_facet Draganov, Andrew
Saulpic, David
Schwiegelshohn, Chris
contents We study the theoretical and practical runtime limits of k-means and k-median clustering on large datasets. Since effectively all clustering methods are slower than the time it takes to read the dataset, the fastest approach is to quickly compress the data and perform the clustering on the compressed representation. Unfortunately, there is no universal best choice for compressing the number of points - while random sampling runs in sublinear time and coresets provide theoretical guarantees, the former does not enforce accuracy while the latter is too slow as the numbers of points and clusters grow. Indeed, it has been conjectured that any sensitivity-based coreset construction requires super-linear time in the dataset size. We examine this relationship by first showing that there does exist an algorithm that obtains coresets via sensitivity sampling in effectively linear time - within log-factors of the time it takes to read the data. Any approach that significantly improves on this must then resort to practical heuristics, leading us to consider the spectrum of sampling strategies across both real and artificial datasets in the static and streaming settings. Through this, we show the conditions in which coresets are necessary for preserving cluster validity as well as the settings in which faster, cruder sampling strategies are sufficient. As a result, we provide a comprehensive theoretical and practical blueprint for effective clustering regardless of data size. Our code is publicly available and has scripts to recreate the experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_01936
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Settling Time vs. Accuracy Tradeoffs for Clustering Big Data
Draganov, Andrew
Saulpic, David
Schwiegelshohn, Chris
Machine Learning
Data Structures and Algorithms
We study the theoretical and practical runtime limits of k-means and k-median clustering on large datasets. Since effectively all clustering methods are slower than the time it takes to read the dataset, the fastest approach is to quickly compress the data and perform the clustering on the compressed representation. Unfortunately, there is no universal best choice for compressing the number of points - while random sampling runs in sublinear time and coresets provide theoretical guarantees, the former does not enforce accuracy while the latter is too slow as the numbers of points and clusters grow. Indeed, it has been conjectured that any sensitivity-based coreset construction requires super-linear time in the dataset size. We examine this relationship by first showing that there does exist an algorithm that obtains coresets via sensitivity sampling in effectively linear time - within log-factors of the time it takes to read the data. Any approach that significantly improves on this must then resort to practical heuristics, leading us to consider the spectrum of sampling strategies across both real and artificial datasets in the static and streaming settings. Through this, we show the conditions in which coresets are necessary for preserving cluster validity as well as the settings in which faster, cruder sampling strategies are sufficient. As a result, we provide a comprehensive theoretical and practical blueprint for effective clustering regardless of data size. Our code is publicly available and has scripts to recreate the experiments.
title Settling Time vs. Accuracy Tradeoffs for Clustering Big Data
topic Machine Learning
Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.01936