Constant approximation for k-median and k-means with outliers via iterative rounding

R Krishnaswamy, S Li, S Sandeep - Proceedings of the 50th annual ACM …, 2018 - dl.acm.org
Proceedings of the 50th annual ACM SIGACT symposium on theory of computing, 2018dl.acm.org
In this paper, we present a new iterative rounding framework for many clustering problems.
Using this, we obtain an (α1+ є≤ 7.081+ є)-approximation algorithm for k-median with
outliers, greatly improving upon the large implicit constant approximation ratio of Chen. For k-
means with outliers, we give an (α2+ є≤ 53.002+ є)-approximation, which is the first O (1)-
approximation for this problem. The iterative algorithm framework is very versatile; we show
how it can be used to give α1-and (α1+ є)-approximation algorithms for matroid and …
In this paper, we present a new iterative rounding framework for many clustering problems. Using this, we obtain an (α1 + є ≤ 7.081 + є)-approximation algorithm for k-median with outliers, greatly improving upon the large implicit constant approximation ratio of Chen. For k-means with outliers, we give an (α2+є ≤ 53.002 + є)-approximation, which is the first O(1)-approximation for this problem. The iterative algorithm framework is very versatile; we show how it can be used to give α1- and (α1 + є)-approximation algorithms for matroid and knapsack median problems respectively, improving upon the previous best approximations ratios of 8 due to Swamy and 17.46 due to Byrka et al. The natural LP relaxation for the k-median/k-means with outliers problem has an unbounded integrality gap. In spite of this negative result, our iterative rounding framework shows that we can round an LP solution to an almost-integral solution of small cost, in which we have at most two fractionally open facilities. Thus, the LP integrality gap arises due to the gap between almost-integral and fully-integral solutions. Then, using a pre-processing procedure, we show how to convert an almost-integral solution to a fully-integral solution losing only a constant-factor in the approximation ratio. By further using a sparsification technique, the additive factor loss incurred by the conversion can be reduced to any є > 0.
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