Correlation Clustering and Biclustering with Locally Bounded Errors

We consider a generalized version of the correlation clustering problem, defined as follows. Given a complete graph G whose edges are labeled with + or −, we wish to partition the graph into clusters while trying to avoid errors: + edges between clusters or − edges within clusters. Classically, one seeks to minimize the total number of such errors. We introduce a new framework that allows the objective to be a more general function of the number of errors at each vertex (for example, we may wish to minimize the number of errors at the worst vertex) and provide a rounding algorithm which converts “fractional clusterings” into discrete clusterings while causing only a constant-factor blowup in the number of errors at each vertex. This rounding algorithm yields constant-factor approximation algorithms for the discrete problem under a wide variety of objective functions.