Shuchi Chawla

Correlation Clustering

We consider the following clustering problem: we have a complete graph on n vertices (items), where each edge (u, v) is labeled either + or − depending on whether u and v have been deemed to be similar or different. The goal is to produce a partition of the vertices (a clustering) that agrees as much as possible with the edge labels. That is, we want a clustering that maximizes the number of + edges within clusters, plus the number of − edges between clusters (equivalently, minimizes the number of disagreements: the number of − edges inside clusters plus the number of + edges between clusters). This formulation is motivated from a document clustering problem in which one has a pairwise similarity function f learned from past data, and the goal is to partition the current set of documents in a way that correlates with f as much as possible; it can also be viewed as a kind of “agnostic learning” problem.An interesting feature of this clustering formulation is that one does not need to specify the number of clusters k as a separate parameter, as in measures such as k-median or min-sum or min-max clustering. Instead, in our formulation, the optimal number of clusters could be any value between 1 and n, depending on the edge labels. We look at approximation algorithms for both minimizing disagreements and for maximizing agreements. For minimizing disagreements, we give a constant factor approximation. For maximizing agreements we give a PTAS, building on ideas of Goldreich, Goldwasser, and Ron (1998) and de la Veg (1996). We also show how to extend some of these results to graphs with edge labels in [−1, +1], and give some results for the case of random noise.

Toward privacy in public databases

We initiate a theoretical study of the census problem. Informally, in a census individual respondents give private information to a trusted party (the census bureau), who publishes a sanitized version of the data. There are two fundamentally conflicting requirements: privacy for the respondents and utility of the sanitized data. Unlike in the study of secure function evaluation, in which privacy is preserved to the extent possible given a specific functionality goal, in the census problem privacy is paramount; intuitively, things that cannot be learned “safely” should not be learned at all. An important contribution of this work is a definition of privacy (and privacy compromise) for statistical databases, together with a method for describing and comparing the privacy offered by specific sanitization techniques. We obtain several privacy results using two different sanitization techniques, and then show how to combine them via cross training. We also obtain two utility results involving clustering.

On the hardness of approximating MULTICUT and SPARSEST-CUT

We show that the MULTICUT, SPARSEST-CUT, and MIN-2CNF/spl equiv/DELETION problems are NP-hard to approximate within every constant factor, assuming the unique games conjecture of Khot [STOC, 2002]. A quantitatively stronger version of the conjecture implies inapproximability factor of /spl Omega/(log log n).

Approximation Algorithms for Orienteering and Discounted-Reward TSP

In this paper, we give the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for the rooted Orienteering problem, as well as a new problem that we call the Discounted-Reward traveling salesman problem (TSP), motivated by robot navigation. In both problems, we are given a graph with lengths on edges and rewards on nodes, and a start node

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Approximation algorithms for orienteering and discounted-reward TSP

. In the Orienteering problem, the goal is to find a path starting at

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Mechanism design for coalition formation and cost sharing in group-buying markets

that maximizes the reward collected, subject to a hard limit on the total length of the path. In the Discounted-Reward TSP, instead of a length limit we are given a discount factor

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, and the goal is to maximize the total discounted reward collected, where the reward for a node reached at time