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.
By Connor Simpson, Ricardo J. G. B. Campello
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.
By Johanna Hillebrand, Jan H\"ockendorff, J\"urgen Kusche, Kelin Luo, Heiko R\"oglin, Melanie Schmidt, Christian Sohler, Bernd Uebbing
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.
By Angshul Majumdar
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: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.
By Anna Livia Croella, Veronica Piccialli, Antonio M. Sudoso
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.
By Kai Ming Ting, Kaifeng Zhang, Sanjay Chawla
arXiv:2401. 10927v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider the problem of partitioning a small data sample of size $n$ drawn from a mixture of $2$ sub-gaussian distributions in $\mathbb{R}^p$.
By Shuheng Zhou
arXiv:2607. 13217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Consider the following variation on the Hierarchical Clustering problem: Usually, while building a hierarchical clustering, one recursively partitions the data until each cluster becomes a singleton.
By Micha{\l} Szyfelbein, Dariusz Dereniowski
arXiv:2411. 12438v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a new approach for clustering non-spherical (i.
By Prashanti Anderson, Mitali Bafna, Rares-Darius Buhai, Pravesh K. Kothari, David Steurer
arXiv:2607. 04949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of k-means clustering on large datasets.
By Cristian Boldrin, Fabio Vandin
arXiv:2602. 08542v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Given a weighted undirected graph, a number of clusters $k$, and an exponent $z$, the goal in the $(k, z)$-clustering problem on graphs is to select $k$ vertices as centers that minimize the sum of the distances raised to the power $z$ of each vertex to its closest center.
By Emilio Cruciani, Sebastian Forster, Antonis Skarlatos
arXiv:2604. 18801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientific particle simulations in cosmology, molecular dynamics, and fluid dynamics produce large-scale datasets whose storage, movement, and analysis increasingly rely on lossy compression.
By Congrong Ren, Sheng Di, Katrin Heitmann, Franck Cappello, Hanqi Guo