Papers › Local Search k-means++ with Foresight
Local Search k-means++ with Foresight
Theo Conrads, Lukas Drexler, Joshua Könen, Daniel R. Schmidt, Melanie Schmidt
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Since its introduction in 1957, Lloyd's algorithm for k-means clustering has been extensively studied and has undergone several improvements. While in its original form it does not guarantee any approximation factor at all, Arthur and Vassilvitskii (SODA 2007) proposed k-means++ which enhances Lloyd's algorithm by a seeding method which guarantees a 𝒪(logk)-approximation in expectation. More recently, Lattanzi and Sohler (ICML 2019) proposed LS++ which further improves the solution quality of k-means++ by local search techniques to obtain a 𝒪(1)-approximation. On the practical side, the greedy variant of k-means++ is often used although its worst-case behaviour is provably worse than for the standard k-means++ variant. We investigate how to improve LS++ further in practice. We study two options for improving the practical performance: (a) Combining LS++ with greedy k-means++ instead of k-means++, and (b) Improving LS++ by better entangling it with Lloyd's algorithm. Option (a) worsens the theoretical guarantees of k-means++ but improves the practical quality also in combination with LS++ as we confirm in our experiments. Option (b) is our new algorithm, Foresight LS++. We experimentally show that FLS++ improves upon the solution quality of LS++. It retains its asymptotic runtime and its worst-case approximation bounds.
In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
Code
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.
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