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Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_6
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper provides provably efficient algorithms for
performing k-means and k-median clustering in the distributed setting.
The main focus of the paper is minimizing communication cost in
the distributed network. Although, i am not very much aware of the
literature, the paper seems to provide a very novel idea of distributed
coresets that leads to clustering algorithms which provably improves the
state of the art communication complexity significantly.
Existing
approaches only use the idea of approximating coresets by taking the union
of local coresets. The key idea in this papers is a construction of
distributed coresets which is different from taking the union and this can
be of independent interest in itself. The theoretical ideas in are based
on the notion of dimension of the function space and the sampling lemma.
The paper also provides a rigorous experimental evaluation and
shows that the proposed algorithms outperforms existing state of art
methods in terms of communication complexity supporting the theory.
One concern is that in experiments the accuracy of the clustering
algorithms is not compared (say for the same communication budget).
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2 sentences
A good paper about minimizing communication cost of
distributed clustering, with solid theoretical & experimental support.
Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_7
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper presents new distributed algoritms for
clustering methods that use centers as cluster representation. The new
algorithms are shown to reduce the communication overhead. At the same
communication cost, the new methods improve clustering objectives for both
synthetic and three UCI datasets.
The paper is very hard-core.
More explanation about the derivation clue and the values of the theorems
would be helpful.
I am a little bit skeptical on the approximation
quality of coreset when the dimensionality increases. Datasets in the
current experiments are most low-dimensional.
The title is too
large. The work is actually on some particular clustering methods that
uses centers and coresets. The word "graphs" is also vague, which does not
reveal any highlights or distinguishable
points. Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
Improved methods for center-based distributed
clustering are presented. The paper is very
hard-core. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_8
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper proposes new distributed algorithms for
k-means and k-median methods. Its main idea is to construct a global
coreset in a distributed fashion using cost information from local
approximations. This paper is well written with solid content. It proposes
distributed protocol for k-means/median clustering based on coreset
construction, provides theoretical guarantee on the approximation and
upper bounds on the communication cost, performs a couple of experiments
to show the proposed approach outperforms the existing ones.
Having said, the paper also comes with several caveats. First of
all, it is not very clear what is the main technical contribution of the
paper, especially given the existing works in [5], [10] and [19]. Using
coreset idea for approximating clustering algorithms is well studied
(e.g., in [5],[10]), and a distributed clustering algorithm based on
coreset is proposed in [19]. I clearly see that this paper contributes a
distributed method for constructing coreset independent of the network
topology, and develops a better algorithm than that in [19], by reducing
the communication cost by a factor of sqrt(n). However, the distributed
coreset construction in Algorithm 1 and the related bounds seems to be a
straightforward application of results in [5].
It is nice to see
the theoretical analysis on the algorithm and the upper bounds on coreset
size and communication cost. However, the upper bounds seem to be too
loose to use in practical applications. Given a dataset and its location
over a distributed network, how could you determine the size of coreset?
The bound for achieving this goal for k-means is along the line of
O(kd/(e^4)), which could be huge even for moderate large k, d and relative
small e. For example, for k=10, d = 100, e = 0.1, the size of coreset
predicted by your bound is 10 million, which could be way more larger than
the actual data size.
In the experiments, the number of
distributed sites is small (e.g., 10 for Pendigits, 25 for
ColorHistogram). Have you tried experiments with larger number of
distributed sites? In addition, the three datasets used are relative-low
dimensional. Would this kind of approach work for high-dimensional sparse
data? Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
This paper is well-written with solid content, but
also comes with several caveats, including unclear technical contribution
and loose upper bounds.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
----------------------------------------
Review 1 Assigned_Reviewer_6
----------------------------------------
Thank you for your
insightful comments.
We would like to clarify a point concerning
your question:
"One concern is that in experiments the accuracy of
the clustering algorithms is not compared (say for the same communication
budget). "
In this work, we focus on the classic k-median/k-means
objectives and our theoretical guarantees are all about the cost of these
objectives (Theorem 1 and Theorem 2). Therefore, in the experimental
section we compare the k-means quality of the solutions obtained by our
algorithm and the other two competitors (Zhang's algorithm and COMBINE)
given the same communication budget; we of course also vary the
communication budget. Please see lines 356-360 and Figures 2 and 3.
We are happy to further clarify this in the final version of the
paper.
---------------------------------------- Review 2
Assigned_Reviewer_7 ----------------------------------------
Thank you for your comments.
We would like to address your
concern regarding the presentation of the paper.
Despite the space
limitation, we have spent significant effort in providing both rigorous
proofs and guiding intuitions. For example, for understanding the
dimension of a function space, which is the key notion in analyzing the
coreset construction, we describe in Section 3 (lines 191 -203) its
relation with the standard VC-dimension. Also, we present a few paragraphs
(lines 212-232) describing the intuition about bounding the error of the
sample (and subsequently the coreset). We will be happy to incorporate any
further explanations you suggest in the final version of the paper.
We will also make our title more specific, such as "Distributed
k-median/k-means clustering on general communication graphs".
For
the experimental section, we would like to point out that the size of the
coreset has a linear dependence on the dimension. This implies that the
approach also works for the high dimensional case.
---------------------------------------- Review 3
Assigned_Reviewer_8 ----------------------------------------
Thank you for your detailed comments. We would like to address
your comments concerning the "unclear technical contributions and loose
upper bounds".
While our results build on tools in [5] (for
example Lemma 1), our construction and analysis require novel ideas. One
key technical contribution we make is to show that the coreset
construction can be performed in a distributed manner while achieving the
same bounds on the coreset size as in the centralized setting. In our
distributed coreset construction (lines 162-173), the points are sampled
according to their contributions to the local solution (as opposed to that
of a global solution as in the analysis of [5] in the centralized
setting), which makes *low communication* possible. The results in [5] do
not imply that such a local sampling scheme leads to the same bounds in
the centralized setting; we show that it is indeed the case. For added
clarity, we will explicitly point out the novelty of our results in the
introduction in the final version of the paper.
Another major
contribution is to provide a much better empirical evaluation of the
coreset-based approach for distributed clustering compared to the prior
work. In particular, in contrast to our thorough evaluation, [5] has no
experiments and [19] only has experiments for data with dimension 1.
Additionally, we would like to address your concern about loose
upper bounds.
Our theoretical bounds and experimental results are
complementary to each other and they can help provide a clear picture for
the benefits of our method. The key point of the theoretical bounds is
that the coreset size can be independent of the actual data size, and
linear in the dimension and the number of clusters. The key point of our
experimental results is that our algorithm performs better than predicted
by the theoretical bounds, and outperforms other coreset construction
algorithms. As we point out in lines 362-364, we do find that in practice
our algorithm needs a communication cost less than 1% of the bounds.
Furthermore, it improves the costs of the other algorithms and thus saves
10%-30% communication cost to achieve the same accuracy (lines 369-372).
Concerning your question about high dimensional data, we would
like to point out that the size of the coreset has a linear dependence on
the dimension. This implies that the approach also works for the high
dimensional case. Experiments on larger graphs using higher dimensional
data will be conducted and the results will be added to the final version
of the paper.
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