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Approximating Dasgupta Cost in Sublinear Time from a Few Random Seeds

Authors Michael Kapralov , Akash Kumar, Silvio Lattanzi , Aida Mousavifar, Weronika Wrzos-Kaminska

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  • Theory of computation → Streaming, sublinear and near linear time algorithms
Keywords
  • Sublinear algorithms
  • Hierarchical Clustering
  • Dasgupta’s Cost

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Abstract

Testing graph cluster structure has been a central object of study in property testing since the foundational work of Goldreich and Ron [STOC'96] on expansion testing, i.e. the problem of distinguishing between a single cluster (an expander) and a graph that is far from a single cluster. More generally, a (k, ε)-clusterable graph G is a graph whose vertex set admits a partition into k induced expanders, each with outer conductance bounded by ε. A recent line of work initiated by Czumaj, Peng and Sohler [STOC'15] has shown how to test whether a graph is close to (k, ε)-clusterable, and to locally determine which cluster a given vertex belongs to with misclassification rate ≈ ε, but no sublinear time algorithms for learning the structure of inter-cluster connections are known. As a simple example, can one locally distinguish between the "cluster graph" forming a line and a clique? 
In this paper, we consider the problem of testing the hierarchical cluster structure of (k, ε)-clusterable graphs in sublinear time. Our measure of hierarchical clusterability is the well-established Dasgupta cost, and our main result is an algorithm that approximates Dasgupta cost of a (k, ε)-clusterable graph in sublinear time, using a small number of randomly chosen seed vertices for which cluster labels are known. Our main result is an O(√{log k}) approximation to Dasgupta cost of G in ≈ n^{1/2+O(ε)} time using ≈ n^{1/3} seeds, effectively giving a sublinear time simulation of the algorithm of Charikar and Chatziafratis [SODA'17] on clusterable graphs. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first result on approximating the hierarchical clustering properties of such graphs in sublinear time.

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Michael Kapralov, Akash Kumar, Silvio Lattanzi, Aida Mousavifar, and Weronika Wrzos-Kaminska. Approximating Dasgupta Cost in Sublinear Time from a Few Random Seeds. In 52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 334, pp. 103:1-103:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.103

Author Details

Michael Kapralov
  • EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Akash Kumar
  • Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India
Silvio Lattanzi
  • Google Research, Zurich, Switzerland
Aida Mousavifar
  • Google, Zurich, Switzerland
Weronika Wrzos-Kaminska
  • EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

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