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Most Influential SIGMOD 2002 Paper · 2026-03 edition

A Monte Carlo Algorithm For Fast Projective Clustering

Cecilia M. Procopiuc; Michael Jones; Pankaj K. Agarwal; T. M. Murali

Venue
ACM SIGMOD Conference (SIGMOD) 2002
Recognition
Most Influential SIGMOD 2002 Paper (Rank No. 7)
Edition
2026-03
Impact factor
6
Certificate ID
11f7e09a4a943e0a

Abstract

We propose a mathematical formulation for the notion of optimal projective cluster, starting from natural requirements on the density of points in subspaces. This allows us to develop a Monte Carlo algorithm for iteratively computing projective clusters. We prove that the computed clusters are good with high probability. We implemented a modified version of the algorithm, using heuristics to speed up computation. Our extensive experiments show that our method is significantly more accurate than previous approaches. In particular, we use our techniques to build a classifier for detecting rotated human faces in cluttered images.

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