CS5140 Assignment 4- Clustering Solution

Overview
In this assignment you will explore clustering: hierarchical and point-assignment. You will also experiment with high dimensional data.
You will use three data sets for this assignment:
• http://www.cs.utah.edu/˜jeffp/teaching/cs5140/A4/C1.txt
• http://www.cs.utah.edu/˜jeffp/teaching/cs5140/A4/C2.txt
• http://www.cs.utah.edu/˜jeffp/teaching/cs5140/A4/C3.txt
These data sets all have the following format. Each line is a data point. The lines have either 3 or 6 tab separated items. The first one is an integer describing the index of the points. The next 2 (or 5 for C3) are the coordinates of the data point. C1 and C2 are in 2 dimensions, and C3 is in 5 dimensions. C1 should have n=19 points, C2 should have n=1040 points, and C3 should have n=1000 points. We will always measure distance with Euclidean distance.
1 Hierarchical Clustering (35 points)
There are many variants of hierarchical clustering; here we explore 3. The key difference is how you measure the distance d(S1,S2) between two clusters S1 and S2.
Single-Link: measures the shortest link .
Complete-Link: measures the longest link .
Mean-Link: measures the distances to the means. First compute and then
d(S1,S2) = ka1 − a2k2 .
B (5 points): Which variant did the best job, and which was the easiest to compute (think if the data was much larger)? Explain your answers.
2 Assignment-Based Clustering (65 points)
Assignment-based clustering works by assigning every point x ∈ X to the closest cluster centers C. Let φC : X → C be this assignment map so that φC(x) = argminc∈C d(x,c). All points that map to the same cluster center are in the same cluster.
Two good heuristics for this type of clustering are the Gonzalez (Algorithm 8.2.1 in M4D book) and k-Means++ (Algorithm 8.3.2) algorithms.

A: (15 points) Run Gonzalez and k-Means++ on data set C2.txt for k = 3. To avoid too much variation in the results, choose c1 as the point with index 1.
Report the centers and the subsets (as pictures) for Gonzalez. Report:
• the 3-center cost maxx∈X d(x,φC(x)) and
q 1 P (d(x,φC(x)))2
• the 3-means cost |X| x∈X
(Note this has been normalized so easy to compare to 3-center cost)
B: (20 points) For k-Means++, the algorithm is randomized, so you will need to report the variation in this algorithm. Run it several trials (at least 20) and plot the cumulative density function of the 3-means cost. Also report what fraction of the time the subsets are the same as the result from Gonzalez.
C: (30 points) Recall that Lloyd’s algorithm for k-means clustering starts with a set of k centers C and runs as described in Algorithm 8.3.1 (in M4D).
1: Run Lloyds Algorithm with C initially with points indexed {1,2,3}. Report the final subset and the 3-means cost.
2: Run Lloyds Algorithm with C initially as the output of Gonzalez above. Report the final subset and the 3-means cost.
3: Run Lloyds Algorithm with C initially as the output of each run of k-Means++ above. Plot a cumulative density function of the 3-means cost. Also report the fraction of the trials that the subsets are the same as the input (where the input is the result of k-Means++).
3 BONUS k-Median Clustering (5 points)
The k-median clustering problem on a data set P is to find a set of k-centers C = {c1,c2,...,ck} to minimize Cost1(P,C) = |P1| Pp∈P d(p,φC(p)). We did not explicitly talk much about this formulation in class, but the techniques to solve it are all typically extensions of approaches we did talk about. This problem will be more open-ended, and will ask you to try various approaches to solve this problem. We will use data set C3.txt.
Find a set of 4 centers C = {c1,c2,c3,c4} for the 4-medians problem on dataset C3.txt. Report the set of centers, as well as Cost1(P,C). The centers should be in the write-up you turn in, but also in a file formatted the same was as the input so we can verify the cost you found. That is each line has 1 center with 6 tab separated numbers. The first being the index (e.g., 1, 2, 3 or 4), and the next 5 being the 5-dimensional coordinates of that center.
Your score will be based on how small a Cost1(P,C) you can find. You can get 2 points for reasonable solution. The smallest found score in the class will get all 5 points. Other scores will obtain points in between.
Very briefly describe how you found the centers.