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Streaming Algorithms and Lower Bounds for Estimating Correlation Clustering Cost

Neural Information Processing Systems

Correlation clustering is a fundamental optimization problem at the intersection of machine learning and theoretical computer science. Motivated by applications to big data processing, recent years have witnessed a flurry of results on this problem in the streaming model. In this model, the algorithm needs to process the input n-vertex graph by making one or few passes over the stream of its edges and using a limited memory, much smaller than the input size. All previous work on streaming correlation clustering has focused on semistreaming algorithms with Ω(n) memory, whereas in this work, we study streaming algorithms with much smaller memory requirements of only polylog(n) bits. This stringent memory requirement is in the same spirit of classical streaming algorithms that instead of recovering a full solution to the problem--which can be prohibitively large with such small memory as is the case in our problem--, aimed to learn certain statistical properties of their inputs.


k-Median Clustering via Metric Embedding: Towards Better Initialization with Differential Privacy

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a new initialization scheme for the k-median problem in the general metric space (e.g., discrete space induced by graphs), based on the construction of metric embedding tree structure of the data. We propose a novel and efficient search algorithm which finds initial centers that can be used subsequently for the local search algorithm. The so-called HST initialization method can produce initial centers achieving lower error than those from another popular method k-median++, also with higher efficiency when k is not too small. Our HST initialization are then extended to the setting of differential privacy (DP) to generate private initial centers. We show that the error of applying DP local search followed by our private HST initialization improves prior results on the approximation error, and approaches the lower bound within a small factor. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.