One-Shot Coresets: The Case of k-Clustering

Scaling clustering algorithms to massive data sets is a challenging task. Recently, several successful approaches based on data summarization methods, such as coresets and sketches, were proposed. While these techniques provide provably good and small summaries, they are inherently problem dependent -- the practitioner has to commit to a fixed clustering objective before even exploring the data. However, can one construct small data summaries for a wide range of clustering problems simultaneously? We affirmatively answer this question by proposing an efficient algorithm that constructs such one-shot summaries for a large family of k-clustering problems while retaining strong theoretical guarantees.