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When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2019.81
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-112020
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2019/11202/
Saha, Barna ;
Subramanian, Sanjay
Correlation Clustering with Same-Cluster Queries Bounded by Optimal Cost
Abstract
Several clustering frameworks with interactive (semi-supervised) queries have been studied in the past. Recently, clustering with same-cluster queries has become popular. An algorithm in this setting has access to an oracle with full knowledge of an optimal clustering, and the algorithm can ask the oracle queries of the form, "Does the optimal clustering put vertices u and v in the same cluster?" Due to its simplicity, this querying model can easily be implemented in real crowd-sourcing platforms and has attracted a lot of recent work.
In this paper, we study the popular correlation clustering problem (Bansal et al., 2002) under the same-cluster querying framework. Given a complete graph G=(V,E) with positive and negative edge labels, correlation clustering objective aims to compute a graph clustering that minimizes the total number of disagreements, that is the negative intra-cluster edges and positive inter-cluster edges. In a recent work, Ailon et al. (2018b) provided an approximation algorithm for correlation clustering that approximates the correlation clustering objective within (1+epsilon) with O((k^{14} log{n} log{k})/epsilon^6) queries when the number of clusters, k, is fixed. For many applications, k is not fixed and can grow with |V|. Moreover, the dependency of k^14 on query complexity renders the algorithm impractical even for datasets with small values of k.
In this paper, we take a different approach. Let C_{OPT} be the number of disagreements made by the optimal clustering. We present algorithms for correlation clustering whose error and query bounds are parameterized by C_{OPT} rather than by the number of clusters. Indeed, a good clustering must have small C_{OPT}. Specifically, we present an efficient algorithm that recovers an exact optimal clustering using at most 2C_{OPT} queries and an efficient algorithm that outputs a 2-approximation using at most C_{OPT} queries. In addition, we show under a plausible complexity assumption, there does not exist any polynomial time algorithm that has an approximation ratio better than 1+alpha for an absolute constant alpha > 0 with o(C_{OPT}) queries. Therefore, our first algorithm achieves the optimal query bound within a factor of 2.
We extensively evaluate our methods on several synthetic and real-world datasets using real crowd-sourced oracles. Moreover, we compare our approach against known correlation clustering algorithms that do not perform querying. In all cases, our algorithms exhibit superior performance.
BibTeX - Entry
@InProceedings{saha_et_al:LIPIcs:2019:11202,
author = {Barna Saha and Sanjay Subramanian},
title = {{Correlation Clustering with Same-Cluster Queries Bounded by Optimal Cost}},
booktitle = {27th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2019)},
pages = {81:1--81:17},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-124-5},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2019},
volume = {144},
editor = {Michael A. Bender and Ola Svensson and Grzegorz Herman},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/11202},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-112020},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2019.81},
annote = {Keywords: Clustering, Approximation Algorithm, Crowdsourcing, Randomized Algorithm}
}
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Keywords: |
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Clustering, Approximation Algorithm, Crowdsourcing, Randomized Algorithm |
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Collection: |
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27th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2019) |
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Issue Date: |
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2019 |
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Date of publication: |
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06.09.2019 |
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Supplementary Material: |
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Code and Data: https://www.github.com/sanjayss34/corr-clust-query-esa2019 |
