Clustering oligarchies

We investigate the extent to which cluster- ing algorithms are robust to the addition of a small, potentially adversarial, set of points. Our analysis reveals radical differences in the robustness of popular clustering methods. k-means and several related techniques are robust when data is clusterable, and we provide a quantitative analysis capturing the precise relationship between clusterabil- ity and robustness. In contrast, com- mon linkage-based algorithms and several standard objective-function-based clustering methods can be highly sensitive to the addi- tion of a small set of points even when the data is highly clusterable. We call such sets of points oligarchies. Lastly, we show that the behavior with re- spect to oligarchies of the popular Lloyd's method changes radically with the initializa- tion technique.