In plain words: Standard k-means lets clusters stretch, so repeated or over-sampled points drag the group centers off. This version picks centers under a cap that keeps any two points in one cluster within 2r, then assigns points, staying reliable on lopsided data.
Abstract · No More Than 6ft Apart: Robust K-Means via Radius Upper Bounds
Centroid based clustering methods such as k-means, k-medoids and k-centers are heavily applied as a go-to tool in exploratory data analysis. In many cases, those methods are used to obtain representative centroids of the data manifold for visualization or summarization of a dataset. Real world datasets often contain inherent abnormalities, e.g., repeated samples and sampling bias, that manifest imbalanced clustering. We propose to remedy such a scenario by introducing a maximal radius constraint $r$ on the clusters formed by the centroids, i.e., samples from the same cluster should not be more than $2r$ apart in terms of $\ell_2$ distance. We achieve this constraint by solving a semi-definite program, followed by a linear assignment problem with quadratic constraints. Through qualitative results, we show that our proposed method is robust towards dataset imbalances and sampling artifacts. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first constrained k-means clustering method with hard radius constraints. Codes at https://bit.ly/kmeans-constrained
Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Randall Balestriero, Anastasios Kyrillidis, Richard Baraniuk
arXiv:2203.02502 · cs.LG, cs.AI · submitted Mar 4, 2022 · updated Jun 15, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted for ICASSP 2022, 8 figures, 1 table
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02502.pdf
https://github.com/AhmedImtiazPrio/radius-constrained-kmeans