Welcome!
To use the personalized features of this site, please log in or register.
If you have forgotten your username or password, we can help.
My Menu
Saved Items

Approximation Algorithms for Clustering to Minimize the Sum of Diameters

Srinivas R. DoddiContact Information, Madhav V. MaratheContact Information, S. S. RaviContact Information, David Scot TaylorContact Information and Peter WidmayerContact Information

(4)  Los Alamos National Laboratory, P. O. Box 1663, MS B265, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
(5)  Los Alamos National Laboratory, P. O. Box 1663, MS M997, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA
(6)  Department of Computer Science, University at Albany - State University of New York, Albany, NY 12222, USA
(7)  Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1596, USA
(8)  Institute for Theoretical Computer Science ETH, 8092 Zürich, Switzerland
Abstract
We consider the problem of partitioning the nodes of a complete edge weighted graph into k clusters so as to minimize the sum of the diameters of the clusters. Since the problem is NP-complete, our focus is on the development of good approximation algorithms. When edge weights satisfy the triangle inequality, we present the first approximation algorithm for the problem. The approximation algorithm yields a solution that has no more than 10k clusters such that the total diameter of these clusters is within a factor O(log (n/k)) of the optimal value for k clusters, where n is the number of nodes in the complete graph. For any fixed k, we present an approximation algorithm that produces k clusters whose total diameter is at most twice the optimal value. When the distances are not required to satisfy the triangle inequality, we show that, unless P = NP, for any n > 1, there is no polynomial time approximation algorithm that can provide a performance guarantee of n even when the number of clusters is fixed at 3. Other results obtained include a polynomial time algorithm for the problem when the underlying graph is a tree with edge weights.
Research Supported by Department of Energy Contract W-7405-ENG-36 and by NSF Grant CCR-97-34936.

Contact Information Srinivas R. Doddi
Email: srinu@lanl.gov

Contact Information Madhav V. Marathe
Email: marathe@lanl.gov

Contact Information S. S. Ravi
Email: ravi@cs.albany.edu

Contact Information David Scot Taylor
Email: dstaylor@cs.ucla.edu

Contact Information Peter Widmayer
Email: widmayer@inf.ethz.ch
Fulltext Preview (Small, Large)
Image of the first page of the fulltext

References secured to subscribers.



Export this chapter
Export this chapter as RIS | Text
 
Remote Address: 38.107.191.107 • Server: mpweb22
HTTP User Agent: CCBot/1.0 (+http://www.commoncrawl.org/bot.html)