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Minimum Spanning Trees: Application To Clustering

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26 views4 pages

Minimum Spanning Trees: Application To Clustering

Uploaded by

sirj0_hn
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Minimum

Spanning Trees

Application to
Algorithms: Design
and Analysis, Part II Clustering
Clustering
[aka “unsupervised learning”]
Informal goal: Given n “points” [Web pages, images, genome
fragments, etc.] classify into “coherent groups”.
Assumptions: (1) As input, given a (dis)similarity measure — a
distance d(p, q) between each point pair.
(2) Symmetric [i.e., d(p, q) = d(q, p)]
Examples: Euclidean distance, genome similarity, etc.
Goal: Same cluster ⇐⇒ “nearby”

Tim Roughgarden
Max-Spacing k-Clusterings
Assume: We know k:= # of clusters desired. [In practice, can
experiment with a range of values]
Call points p & q separated if they’re assigned to different clusters.

Definition: The spacing of a k-clustering is minseparatedp,q d(p, q).


(The bigger the better)

Problem statement: Given a distance measure d and k, compute


the k-clustering with maximum spacing.

Tim Roughgarden
A Greedy Algorithm
- Initially, each point in a separate cluster
- Repeat until only k clusters:
- Let p, q = closest pair of separated points (determines the
current spacing)
-Merge the clusters containing p & q into a single cluster.
Note: Just like Kruskal’s MST algorithm, but stopped early.
- Points ↔ vertices, distances ↔ edge costs, point pairs ↔ edges.
⇒ Called single-link clustering

Tim Roughgarden

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