{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/fast-and-provably-good-seedings-for-k-means","title":"Fast and Provably Good Seedings for k-Means","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2016-12-01","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2016 12","authors":["Olivier Bachem","Mario Lucic","Hamed Hassani","Andreas Krause"],"abstract":"Seeding - the task of finding initial cluster centers - is critical in obtaining high-quality clusterings for k-Means. However, k-means++ seeding, the state of the art algorithm, does not scale well to massive datasets as it is inherently sequential and requires k full passes through the data. It was recently shown that Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling can be used to efficiently approximate the seeding step of k-means++. However, this result requires assumptions on the data generating distribution.  We propose a simple yet fast seeding algorithm that produces *provably* good clusterings even *without assumptions* on the data. Our analysis shows that the algorithm allows for a favourable trade-off between solution quality and computational cost, speeding up k-means++ seeding by up to several orders of magnitude. We validate our theoretical results in extensive experiments on a variety of real-world data sets.","url_abs":"http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6478-fast-and-provably-good-seedings-for-k-means","url_pdf":"http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6478-fast-and-provably-good-seedings-for-k-means.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"fast-and-provably-good-seedings-for-k-means","repo_url":"https://github.com/elki-project/elki","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}