Semi-Supervised Algorithms for Approximately Optimal and Accurate Clustering

We study $k$-means clustering in a semi-supervised setting. Given an oracle that returns whether two given points belong to the same cluster in a fixed optimal clustering, we investigate the following question: how many oracle queries are sufficient to efficiently recover a clustering that, with probability at least $(1 - δ)$, simultaneously has a cost of at most $(1 + ε)$ times the optimal cost and an accuracy of at least $(1 - ε)$? We show how to achieve such a clustering on $n$ points with $O{((k^2 \log n) \cdot m{(Q, ε^4, δ/ (k\log n))})}$ oracle queries, when the $k$ clusters can be learned with an $ε'$ error and a failure probability $δ'$ using $m(Q, ε',δ')$ labeled samples in the supervised setting, where $Q$ is the set of candidate cluster centers. We show that $m(Q, ε', δ')$ is small both for $k$-means instances in Euclidean space and for those in finite metric spaces. We further show that, for the Euclidean $k$-means instances, we can avoid the dependency on $n$ in the query complexity at the expense of an increased dependency on $k$: specifically, we give a slightly more involved algorithm that uses $O(k^4/(ε^2 δ) + (k^{9}/ε^4) \log(1/δ) + k \cdot m(\mathbb{R}^r, ε^4/k, δ))$ oracle queries. We also show that the number of queries needed for $(1 - ε)$-accuracy in Euclidean $k$-means must linearly depend on the dimension of the underlying Euclidean space, and for finite metric space $k$-means, we show that it must at least be logarithmic in the number of candidate centers. This shows that our query complexities capture the right dependencies on the respective parameters.