Abstract
Complete-linkage clustering is a very popular method for computing hierarchical clusterings in practice, which is not fully understood theoretically. Given a finite set P ⊆ ℝd of points, the complete-linkage method starts with each point from P in a cluster of its own and then iteratively merges two clusters from the current clustering that have the smallest diameter when merged into a single cluster.
We study the problem of partitioning P into k clusters such that the largest diameter of the clusters is minimized and we prove that the complete-linkage method computes an O(1)-approximation for this problem for any metric that is induced by a norm, assuming that the dimension d is a constant. This improves the best previously known bound of O(logk) due to Ackermann et al. (Algorithmica, 2014). Our improved bound also carries over to the k-center and the discrete k-center problem.
This research was supported by ERC Starting Grant 306465 (BeyondWorstCase).
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Großwendt, A., Röglin, H. (2015). Improved Analysis of Complete-Linkage Clustering. In: Bansal, N., Finocchi, I. (eds) Algorithms - ESA 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9294. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48350-3_55
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48350-3_55
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