Symmetric Submodular Clustering with Actionable Constraint

Abstract

Clustering with submodular functions has been of interest over the last few years. Symmetric submodular functions are of particular interest as minimizing them is significantly more efficient and they include many commonly used functions in practice viz. graph cuts, mutual information. In this paper, we propose a novel constraint to make clustering actionable which is motivated by applications across multiple domains, and pose the problem of performing symmetric submodular clustering subject to this constraint. We see that obtaining a k partition with approximation guarantees is a non-trivial task requiring further work. * This research work benefited from the support of the AIRBUS Group Corporate Foundation Chair in Mathematics of Complex Systems established in ICTS-TIFR.1 This is relative to the objective we are minimizing/maximizing.