Improved Polynomial-Time Approximations for Clustering with Minimum Sum of Radii or Diameters
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We give an improved approximation algorithm for two related clustering problems. In the Minimum Sum of Radii clustering problem (MSR), we are to select k balls in a metric space to cover all points while minimizing the sum of the radii of these balls. In the Minimum Sum of Diameters clustering problem (MSD), we are to simply partition the points of a metric space into k parts while minimizing the sum of the diameters of these parts. We present a 3.389-approximation for MSR and a 6.546-approximation for MSD, improving over their respective 3.504 and 7.008 approximations developed by Charikar and Panigrahy (2001). In particular, our guarantee for MSD is better than twice our guarantee for MSR. Our approach refines a so-called bipoint rounding procedure of Charikar and Panigrahy’s algorithm by considering centering balls at some points that were not necessarily centers in the bipoint solution. This added versatility enables the analysis of our improved approximation guarantees. We also provide an alternative approach to finding the bipoint solution using a straightforward LP rounding procedure rather than a primal-dual algorithm.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it