Papers › Entropy Regularized Power k-Means Clustering

Entropy Regularized Power k-Means Clustering

10 Jan 2020arXiv:2001.03452archive 2025-07-28

Saptarshi Chakraborty, Debolina Paul, Swagatam Das, Jason Xu

Despite its well-known shortcomings, k-means remains one of the most widely used approaches to data clustering. Current research continues to tackle its flaws while attempting to preserve its simplicity. Recently, the \textit{power k-means} algorithm was proposed to avoid trapping in local minima by annealing through a family of smoother surfaces. However, the approach lacks theoretical justification and fails in high dimensions when many features are irrelevant. This paper addresses these issues by introducing \textit{entropy regularization} to learn feature relevance while annealing. We prove consistency of the proposed approach and derive a scalable majorization-minimization algorithm that enjoys closed-form updates and convergence guarantees. In particular, our method retains the same computational complexity of k-means and power k-means, but yields significant improvements over both. Its merits are thoroughly assessed on a suite of real and synthetic data experiments.

PaperPDFCode

Code

DebolinaPaul/EWP officialmentioned in paper report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Clustering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections