An Empirical Evaluation of k-Means Coresets

07/03/2022

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by   Chris Schwiegelshohn, et al.

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Coresets are among the most popular paradigms for summarizing data. In particular, there exist many high performance coresets for clustering problems such as k-means in both theory and practice. Curiously, there exists no work on comparing the quality of available k-means coresets. In this paper we perform such an evaluation. There currently is no algorithm known to measure the distortion of a candidate coreset. We provide some evidence as to why this might be computationally difficult. To complement this, we propose a benchmark for which we argue that computing coresets is challenging and which also allows us an easy (heuristic) evaluation of coresets. Using this benchmark and real-world data sets, we conduct an exhaustive evaluation of the most commonly used coreset algorithms from theory and practice.