Exact Algorithms for the Special Cases of Two Hard to Solve Problems of Searching for the Largest Subset

摘要

We consider two problems of searching for the largest subset in a finite set of points in Euclidean space. Both problems have applications, in particular, in data analysis and data approximation. In each problem, an input set and a positive real number are given and it is required to find a subset (i.e., a cluster) of the largest size under a constraint on the value of a quadratic function. The points in the input set which are outside the sought subset are treated as a second cluster. In the first problem, the function in the constraint is the sum over both clusters of the intracluster sums of the squared distances between the elements of the clusters and their centers. The center of the first (i.e., sought) cluster is unknown and determined as the centroid, while the center of the second one is fixed in a given point in Euclidean space (without loss of generality in the origin). In the second problem, the function in the constraint is the sum over both clusters of the weighted intracluster sums of the squared distances between the elements of the clusters and their centers. As in the first problem, the center of the first cluster is unknown and determined as the centroid, while the center of the second one is fixed in the origin. In this paper, we show that both problems are strongly NP-hard. Also, we present exact algorithms for the cases of these problems in which the input points have integer components. If the space dimension is bounded by some constant, the algorithms are pseudopolynomial.