Approximation Algorithms for Clustering Uncertain Data

Summary: Defines assigned vs unassigned models for clustering uncertain points and reduces uncertain k-means/k-median to weighted deterministic instances. Gives first approximation algorithms for uncertain k-center: O(k/ε · log^2 n) centers for (1+ε) and 2k centers for constant-factor. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 1458
Venue: PODS
Year: 2008
Pagerank: 8.8664016e-05
Overall Rank: 2,253 | 84.55%
DOI: 10.1145/1376916.1376944

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Graham Cormode (AT&T)
2. Andrew McGregor (University of California San Diego)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{cormode_pods08,
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        series = {{PODS} '08},
        title = {{Approximation Algorithms for Clustering Uncertain Data}},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1376916.1376944},
        doi = {10.1145/1376916.1376944},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        author = {Cormode, Graham and McGregor, Andrew},
        year = {2008}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,049	k-Nearest Neighbors in Uncertain Graphs	2010	VLDB	0.00012415522
3,483	Consensus Answers for Queries over Probabilistic Databases	2009	PODS	7.372823e-05
6,812	Exceeding Expectations and Clustering Uncertain Data	2009	PODS	5.7657129e-05
6,974	Uncertain Centroid based Partitional Clustering of Uncertain Data	2012	VLDB	5.7303405e-05
8,741	Improvements on the k-center Problem for Uncertain Data	2018	PODS	5.3766157e-05
9,281	Sage: A System for Uncertain Network Analysis	2022	VLDB	5.2933125e-05
12,505	Large-Scale Uncertainty Management Systems: Learning and Exploiting Your Data (Tutorial Summary)	2009	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
31	BIRCH: An Efficient Data Clustering Method for Very Large Databases	1996	SIGMOD	0.00050347119
78	ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage	2006	VLDB	0.00036571789
351	CURE: An Efficient Clustering Algorithm for Large Databases	1998	SIGMOD	0.00020424271
2,697	Sketching Probabilistic Data Streams	2007	SIGMOD	8.2451054e-05
2,988	Estimating Statistical Aggregates on Probabilistic Data Streams	2007	PODS	7.8907087e-05

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