# Simple and sharp analysis of k-means||

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.02518 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.02518/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [A Nearly Tight Analysis of Greedy k-means++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.07949/) (2022)
- [Randomizing the Number of Centers in k-means++](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.26202/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present a simple analysis of k-means|| (Bahmani et al., PVLDB 2012) -- a distributed variant of the k-means++ algorithm (Arthur and Vassilvitskii, SODA 2007). Moreover, the bound on the number of rounds is improved from O(log n) to O(log n / loglog n), which we show to be tight.