Structured Inverted-File k-Means Clustering for High-Dimensional Sparse Data

This paper presents an architecture-friendly k-means clustering algorithm called SIVF for a large-scale and high-dimensional sparse data set. Algorithm efficiency on time is often measured by the number of costly operations such as similarity calculations. In practice, however, it depends greatly on how the algorithm adapts to an architecture of the computer system which it is executed on. Our proposed SIVF employs invariant centroid-pair based filter (ICP) to decrease the number of similarity calculations between a data object and centroids of all the clusters. To maximize the ICP performance, SIVF exploits for a centroid set an inverted-file that is structured so as to reduce pipeline hazards. We demonstrate in our experiments on real large-scale document data sets that SIVF operates at higher speed and with lower memory consumption than existing algorithms. Our performance analysis reveals that SIVF achieves the higher speed by suppressing performance degradation factors of the number of cache misses and branch mispredictions rather than less similarity calculations.

Inverted-File k-Means Clustering: Performance Analysis

This paper presents an inverted-file k-means clustering algorithm (IVF) suitable for a large-scale sparse data set with potentially numerous classes. Given such a data set, IVF efficiently works at high-speed and with low memory consumption, which keeps the same solution as a standard Lloyd's algorithm. The high performance arises from two distinct data representations. One is a sparse expression for both the object and mean feature vectors. The other is an inverted-file data structure for a set of the mean feature vectors. To confirm the effect of these representations, we design three algorithms using distinct data structures and expressions for comparison. We experimentally demonstrate that IVF achieves better performance than the designed algorithms when they are applied to large-scale real document data sets in a modern computer system equipped with superscalar out-of-order processors and a deep hierarchical memory system. We also introduce a simple yet practical clock-cycle per instruction (CPI) model for speed-performance analysis. Analytical results reveal that IVF suppresses three performance degradation factors: the numbers of cache misses, branch mispredictions, and the completed instructions.