Parameterized k-Clustering: Tractability Island

Abstract

In k-Clustering we are given a multiset of n vectors X subset Z^d and a nonnegative number D, and we need to decide whether X can be partitioned into k clusters C_1, ..., C_k such that the cost sum_{i=1}^k min_{c_i in R^d} sum_{x in C_i} |x-c_i|_p^p <= D, where |*|_p is the Minkowski (L_p) norm of order p. For p=1, k-Clustering is the well-known k-Median. For p=2, the case of the Euclidean distance, k-Clustering is k-Means. We study k-Clustering from the perspective of parameterized complexity. The problem is known to be NP-hard for k=2 and it is also NP-hard for d=2. It is a long-standing open question, whether the problem is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) for the combined parameter d+k. In this paper, we focus on the parameterization by D. We complement the known negative results by showing that for p=0 and p=infty, k-Clustering is W1-hard when parameterized by D. Interestingly, the complexity landscape of the problem appears to be more intricate than expected. We discover a tractability island of k-Clustering: for every p in (0,1], k-Clustering is solvable in time 2^O(D log D) (nd)^O(1).