{"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-distributed-k-means-with-a-small-number","title":"Fast Distributed k-Means with a Small Number of Rounds","arxiv_id":"2201.13217","date":"2022-01-31","proceeding":null,"authors":["Tom Hess","Ron Visbord","Sivan Sabato"],"abstract":"We propose a new algorithm for k-means clustering in a distributed setting, where the data is distributed across many machines, and a coordinator communicates with these machines to calculate the output clustering. Our algorithm guarantees a cost approximation factor and a number of communication rounds that depend only on the computational capacity of the coordinator. Moreover, the algorithm includes a built-in stopping mechanism, which allows it to use fewer communication rounds whenever possible. We show both theoretically and empirically that in many natural cases, indeed 1-4 rounds suffice. In comparison with the popular k-means|| algorithm, our approach allows exploiting a larger coordinator capacity to obtain a smaller number of rounds. Our experiments show that the k-means cost obtained by the proposed algorithm is usually better than the cost obtained by k-means||, even when the latter is allowed a larger number of rounds. Moreover, the machine running time in our approach is considerably smaller than that of k-means||. Code for running the algorithm and experiments is available at https://github.com/selotape/distributed_k_means.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.13217v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.13217v2.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-distributed-k-means-with-a-small-number","repo_url":"https://github.com/selotape/distributed_k_means","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"k-means-clustering","method_name":"k-Means Clustering"}],"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}