No Arabic abstract
Recent works on Hierarchical Clustering (HC), a well-studied problem in exploratory data analysis, have focused on optimizing various objective functions for this problem under arbitrary similarity measures. In this paper we take the first step and give novel scalable algorithms for this problem tailored to Euclidean data in R^d and under vector-based similarity measures, a prevalent model in several typical machine learning applications. We focus primarily on the popular Gaussian kernel and other related measures, presenting our results through the lens of the objective introduced recently by Moseley and Wang [2017]. We show that the approximation factor in Moseley and Wang [2017] can be improved for Euclidean data. We further demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally that our algorithms scale to very high dimension d, while outperforming average-linkage and showing competitive results against other less scalable approaches.
Hierarchical clustering is a fundamental task often used to discover meaningful structures in data, such as phylogenetic trees, taxonomies of concepts, subtypes of cancer, and cascades of particle decays in particle physics. Typically approximate algorithms are used for inference due to the combinatorial number of possible hierarchical clusterings. In contrast to existing methods, we present novel dynamic-programming algorithms for emph{exact} inference in hierarchical clustering based on a novel trellis data structure, and we prove that we can exactly compute the partition function, maximum likelihood hierarchy, and marginal probabilities of sub-hierarchies and clusters. Our algorithms scale in time and space proportional to the powerset of $N$ elements which is super-exponentially more efficient than explicitly considering each of the (2N-3)!! possible hierarchies. Also, for larger datasets where our exact algorithms become infeasible, we introduce an approximate algorithm based on a sparse trellis that compares well to other benchmarks. Exact methods are relevant to data analyses in particle physics and for finding correlations among gene expression in cancer genomics, and we give examples in both areas, where our algorithms outperform greedy and beam search baselines. In addition, we consider Dasguptas cost with synthetic data.
Recently, Hierarchical Clustering (HC) has been considered through the lens of optimization. In particular, two maximization objectives have been defined. Moseley and Wang defined the emph{Revenue} objective to handle similarity information given by a weighted graph on the data points (w.l.o.g., $[0,1]$ weights), while Cohen-Addad et al. defined the emph{Dissimilarity} objective to handle dissimilarity information. In this paper, we prove structural lemmas for both objectives allowing us to convert any HC tree to a tree with constant number of internal nodes while incurring an arbitrarily small loss in each objective. Although the best-known approximations are 0.585 and 0.667 respectively, using our lemmas we obtain approximations arbitrarily close to 1, if not all weights are small (i.e., there exist constants $epsilon, delta$ such that the fraction of weights smaller than $delta$, is at most $1 - epsilon$); such instances encompass many metric-based similarity instances, thereby improving upon prior work. Finally, we introduce Hierarchical Correlation Clustering (HCC) to handle instances that contain similarity and dissimilarity information simultaneously. For HCC, we provide an approximation of 0.4767 and for complementary similarity/dissimilarity weights (analogous to $+/-$ correlation clustering), we again present nearly-optimal approximations.
Hierarchical clustering is a popular unsupervised data analysis method. For many real-world applications, we would like to exploit prior information about the data that imposes constraints on the clustering hierarchy, and is not captured by the set of features available to the algorithm. This gives rise to the problem of hierarchical clustering with structural constraints. Structural constraints pose major challenges for bottom-up approaches like average/single linkage and even though they can be naturally incorporated into top-down divisive algorithms, no formal guarantees exist on the quality of their output. In this paper, we provide provable approximation guarantees for two simple top-down algorithms, using a recently introduced optimization viewpoint of hierarchical clustering with pairwise similarity information [Dasgupta, 2016]. We show how to find good solutions even in the presence of conflicting prior information, by formulating a constraint-based regularization of the objective. We further explore a variation of this objective for dissimilarity information [Cohen-Addad et al., 2018] and improve upon current techniques. Finally, we demonstrate our approach on a real dataset for the taxonomy application.
Hierarchical Clustering (HC) is a widely studied problem in exploratory data analysis, usually tackled by simple agglomerative procedures like average-linkage, single-linkage or complete-linkage. In this paper we focus on two objectives, introduced recently to give insight into the performance of average-linkage clustering: a similarity based HC objective proposed by [Moseley and Wang, 2017] and a dissimilarity based HC objective proposed by [Cohen-Addad et al., 2018]. In both cases, we present tight counterexamples showing that average-linkage cannot obtain better than 1/3 and 2/3 approximations respectively (in the worst-case), settling an open question raised in [Moseley and Wang, 2017]. This matches the approximation ratio of a random solution, raising a natural question: can we beat average-linkage for these objectives? We answer this in the affirmative, giving two new algorithms based on semidefinite programming with provably better guarantees.
Clustering is a fundamental tool for analyzing large data sets. A rich body of work has been devoted to designing data-stream algorithms for the relevant optimization problems such as $k$-center, $k$-median, and $k$-means. Such algorithms need to be both time and and space efficient. In this paper, we address the problem of correlation clustering in the dynamic data stream model. The stream consists of updates to the edge weights of a graph on $n$ nodes and the goal is to find a node-partition such that the end-points of negative-weight edges are typically in different clusters whereas the end-points of positive-weight edges are typically in the same cluster. We present polynomial-time, $O(ncdot mbox{polylog}~n)$-space approximation algorithms for natural problems that arise. We first develop data structures based on linear sketches that allow the quality of a given node-partition to be measured. We then combine these data structures with convex programming and sampling techniques to solve the relevant approximation problem. Unfortunately, the standard LP and SDP formulations are not obviously solvable in $O(ncdot mbox{polylog}~n)$-space. Our work presents space-efficient algorithms for the convex programming required, as well as approaches to reduce the adaptivity of the sampling.