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Constant Approximation for Individual Preference Stable Clustering

Anders Aamand · Justin Chen · Allen Liu · Sandeep Silwal · Pattara Sukprasert · Ali Vakilian · Fred Zhang

Great Hall & Hall B1+B2 (level 1) #1013
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Tue 12 Dec 3:15 p.m. PST — 5:15 p.m. PST

Abstract: Individual preference (IP) stability, introduced by Ahmadi et al. (ICML 2022), is a natural clustering objective inspired by stability and fairness constraints. A clustering is $\alpha$-IP stable if the average distance of every data point to its own cluster is at most $\alpha$ times the average distance to any other cluster. Unfortunately, determining if a dataset admits a $1$-IP stable clustering is NP-Hard. Moreover, before this work, it was unknown if an $o(n)$-IP stable clustering always exists, as the prior state of the art only guaranteed an $O(n)$-IP stable clustering. We close this gap in understanding and show that an $O(1)$-IP stable clustering always exists for general metrics, and we give an efficient algorithm which outputs such a clustering. We also introduce generalizations of IP stability beyond average distance and give efficient near optimal algorithms in the cases where we consider the maximum and minimum distances within and between clusters.

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