arXiv:2502. 08397v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Clustering is a fundamental technique in data analysis and machine learning, used to group similar data points together.
arXiv:2607. 15835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Big data clustering remains challenging: the Minimum Sum-of-Squares Clustering (MSSC) problem underlying K-means is NP-hard, and existing methods either reach poor local minima or require prohibitive metaheuristic hybrids.
arXiv:2606. 18972v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting a flat clustering solution from a hierarchy is a common task in practical cluster analysis and can be formulated as an optimisation problem.
The paper introduces the Universal Clustering Problem (UCP), a framework that captures the optimisation core common to many clustering methods by maximizing a polynomial‑time computable partition utility over a finite metric space. It proves UCP is NP‑hard through reductions from graph colouring and exact cover by 3‑sets, showing that popular algorithms such as k‑means, GMMs, DBSCAN, spectral clustering, and affinity propagation inherit this intractability. The authors argue that this unified hardness explains typical failure modes—like local optima and greedy merge traps—and suggest moving toward stability‑aware objectives and interaction‑driven formulations with explicit guarantees.
arXiv:2601. 06351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anticlustering is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that consists of partitioning a set of objects into equal-sized groups called anticlusters such that the objects in the same anticluster are as dissimilar as possible and thereby representative of the entire set of objects.
arXiv:2607. 24237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many existing clustering methods are designed based on a set-oriented definition---a cluster is a set of similar points---relying a point-to-point similarity function to find similar points.
Extracting a flat clustering solution from a hierarchy is a common task in practical cluster analysis and can be formulated as an optimisation problem. Existing approaches focus on finding a single optimal solution.
arXiv:2606. 05230v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting a clustering algorithm and its hyperparameters without labels is a common difficulty in engineering machine learning pipelines that work with unsupervised analysis of sensor, image, or process data.
arXiv:2606. 00327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is widely used across the sciences as the foundation for downstream data-driven scientific discoveries.
arXiv:2607. 04949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of k-means clustering on large datasets.
arXiv:2609. 30477v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exact Euclidean \(K\)-means partitions \(n\) observations into \(K\) unlabelled clusters, but the unrestricted search is generally exponential.
arXiv:2607. 19704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling LLM-based applications to millions of users is bottlenecked by the inference cost and latency of modern foundation models.
arXiv:2608. 14215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constrained optimization extends classical optimization by integrating side information, making it widely applicable across scientific and engineering domains.