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Poster
Tue Aug 08 01:30 AM -- 05:00 AM (PDT) @ Gallery #76
Uniform Deviation Bounds for k-Means Clustering
Olivier Bachem · Mario Lucic · Hamed Hassani · Andreas Krause

Uniform deviation bounds limit the difference between a model's expected loss and its loss on an empirical sample uniformly for all models in a learning problem. In this paper, we provide a novel framework to obtain uniform deviation bounds for loss functions which are unbounded. As a result, we obtain competitive uniform deviation bounds for k-Means clustering under weak assumptions on the underlying distribution. If the fourth moment is bounded, we prove a rate of O(m^(-1/2)) compared to the previously known O(m^(-1/4)) rate. Furthermore, we show that the rate also depends on the kurtosis - the normalized fourth moment which measures the "tailedness" of a distribution. We also provide improved rates under progressively stronger assumptions, namely, bounded higher moments, subgaussianity and bounded support of the underlying distribution.