Scaffold-Constrained Subset Dynamic Programming for Exact SSE Clustering

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.30477v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exact Euclidean \(K\)-means partitions \(n\) observations into \(K\) unlabelled clusters, but the unrestricted search is generally exponential. We use data-derived geometric graphs to precondition an exact subset dynamic program: as a result only connected vertex subsets are admitted as clusters, while sum-of-squared-errors (SSE) loss is unchanged. A remaining-set recurrence minimises fixed-\(K\) or penalised SSE, with exact factorisation over the connected components of each remaining set. The central question we study is how much computational support can be removed while preserving an unrestricted optimum. Graph inclusion gives monotone coverage and support relations, and a bottleneck threshold identifies the first covering graph in a ne