The Power of Uniform Sampling for Coresets

Motivated by practical generalizations of the classic k-median and k-means objectives, such as clustering with size constraints, fair clustering, and Wasserstein barycenter, we introduce a meta-theorem for designing coresets for constrained-clustering problems. The meta-theorem reduces the task of coreset construction to one on a bounded number of ring instances with a much-relaxed additive error. This reduction enables us to construct coresets using uniform sampling, in contrast to the widely-used importance sampling, and consequently we can easily handle constrained objectives. Notably and perhaps surprisingly, this simpler sampling scheme can yield coresets whose size is independent of n, the number of input points. Our technique yields smaller coresets, and sometimes the first coresets, for a large number of constrained clustering problems, including capacitated clustering, fair clustering, Euclidean Wasserstein barycenter, clustering in minor-excluded graph, and polygon clustering under Fr'echet and Hausdorff distance. Finally, our technique yields also smaller coresets for 1-median in low-dimensional Euclidean spaces, specifically of size tildeO(varepsilon-1.5) in ℝ2 and tildeO(varepsilon-1.6) in ℝ3.