Check the preview of 2nd version of this platform
being developed by the open MLCommons taskforce on automation and reproducibility
as a free, open-source and technology-agnostic on-prem platform.
Communication-Optimal Distributed Clustering
lib:9d92d14c4a7f8924 (v1.0.0)
Authors: Jiecao Chen,He Sun,David P. Woodruff,Qin Zhang
Where published: NeurIPS 2016 12
ArXiv: 1702.00196
Document: PDF DOI
Abstract URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00196v1
Clustering large datasets is a fundamental problem with a number of applications in machine learning. Data is often collected on different sites and clustering needs to be performed in a distributed manner with low communication. We would like the quality of the clustering in the distributed setting to match that in the centralized setting for which all the data resides on a single site. In this work, we study both graph and geometric clustering problems in two distributed models: (1) a point-to-point model, and (2) a model with a broadcast channel. We give protocols in both models which we show are nearly optimal by proving almost matching communication lower bounds. Our work highlights the surprising power of a broadcast channel for clustering problems; roughly speaking, to spectrally cluster $n$ points or $n$ vertices in a graph distributed across $s$ servers, for a worst-case partitioning the communication complexity in a point-to-point model is $n \cdot s$, while in the broadcast model it is $n + s$. A similar phenomenon holds for the geometric setting as well. We implement our algorithms and demonstrate this phenomenon on real life datasets, showing that our algorithms are also very efficient in practice.
Where published: NeurIPS 2016 12
ArXiv: 1702.00196
Document: PDF DOI
Abstract URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00196v1
Clustering large datasets is a fundamental problem with a number of applications in machine learning. Data is often collected on different sites and clustering needs to be performed in a distributed manner with low communication. We would like the quality of the clustering in the distributed setting to match that in the centralized setting for which all the data resides on a single site. In this work, we study both graph and geometric clustering problems in two distributed models: (1) a point-to-point model, and (2) a model with a broadcast channel. We give protocols in both models which we show are nearly optimal by proving almost matching communication lower bounds. Our work highlights the surprising power of a broadcast channel for clustering problems; roughly speaking, to spectrally cluster $n$ points or $n$ vertices in a graph distributed across $s$ servers, for a worst-case partitioning the communication complexity in a point-to-point model is $n \cdot s$, while in the broadcast model it is $n + s$. A similar phenomenon holds for the geometric setting as well. We implement our algorithms and demonstrate this phenomenon on real life datasets, showing that our algorithms are also very efficient in practice.
Relevant initiatives
Related knowledge about this paper
Reproduced results (crowd-benchmarking and competitions)
Artifact and reproducibility checklists
- ACM/cTuning artifact appendix and reproducibility checklist
- NeurIPS reproducibility checklist
- SIGPLAN's checklist for empirical evaluation
- Collective Knowledge (organizing research projects based on FAIR principles)