"Hierarchical clustering is a stronger extension of one of today's most influential unsupervised learning methods: clustering. The goal of this method is to create a hierarchy of clusters, thus constructing cluster evolutionary history and simultaneously finding clusterings at all resolutions. We propose four traits of interest for hierarchical clustering algorithms: (1) empirical performance, (2) theoretical guarantees, (3) balance (the minimum ratio between cluster sizes), and (4) scalability. While a number of algorithms are designed to achieve one to two of these traits at a time, there exist none that achieve all four.



Inspired by Bateni et al.'s scalable and empirically successful Affinity Clustering [NeurIPs 2017], we introduce Affinity's successor, Matching Affinity Clustering. Like its predecessor, Matching Affinity Clustering maintains strong empirical performance, even outperforming Affinity when the dataset is size 2^n and clusters are balanced, and uses Massively Parallel Communication as its distributed model. Designed to maintain provably balanced clusters, we show that our algorithm achieves a (1/3-epsilon)-approximation for Moseley and Wang's revenue (the dual to Dasgupta's cost) when the data set is of size 2^n, and a (1/9-epsilon)-approximation in general. We prove the former approximation is tight, and also that Affinity Clustering cannot do better than a 1/O(n)-approximation. In addition, we see that our algorithm empirically performs similarly to Affinity Clustering and k-Means, outperforming many state-of-the-art serial algorithms. Along the way, we also introduce an efficient k-sized maximum matching algorithm in the MPC model."

Matching Affinity Clustering: Improved Hierarchical Clustering at Scale with Guarantees

Learning and Adaptation

technical paper

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). The aim of the joint conference is to provide a single, high-profile, internationally-respected archival forum for scientific research in the theory and practice of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

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AAMAS 2020

AAMAS is the leading scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multi-agent systems. The AAMAS conference series was initiated in 2002 as the merging of three respected scientific meetings: the International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS), the International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL), and the International Conference on Autonomous Agents (AA). 

Marina Knittel

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Matching Affinity Clustering: Improved Hierarchical Clustering at Scale with Guarantees

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