Papers › Tree-Guided L₁-Convex Clustering

Tree-Guided L₁-Convex Clustering

31 Mar 2025arXiv:2503.24012archive 2025-07-28

Bingyuan Zhang, Yoshikazu Terada

Convex clustering is a modern clustering framework that guarantees globally optimal solutions and performs comparably to other advanced clustering methods. However, obtaining a complete dendrogram (clusterpath) for large-scale datasets remains computationally challenging due to the extensive costs associated with iterative optimization approaches. To address this limitation, we develop a novel convex clustering algorithm called Tree-Guided L₁-Convex Clustering (TGCC). We first focus on the fact that the loss function of L₁-convex clustering with tree-structured weights can be efficiently optimized using a dynamic programming approach. We then develop an efficient cluster fusion algorithm that utilizes the tree structure of the weights to accelerate the optimization process and eliminate the issue of cluster splits commonly observed in convex clustering. By combining the dynamic programming approach with the cluster fusion algorithm, the TGCC algorithm achieves superior computational efficiency without sacrificing clustering performance. Remarkably, our TGCC algorithm can construct a complete clusterpath for 10⁶ points in ℝ² within 15 seconds on a standard laptop without the need for parallel or distributed computing frameworks. Moreover, we extend the TGCC algorithm to develop biclustering and sparse convex clustering algorithms.

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ClusteringComputational EfficiencyDistributed Computing

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