Brief Announcement: Scalable Diversity Maximization via Small-size Composable Core-sets

In this paper, we study the diversity maximization problem (a.k.a. maximum dispersion problem) in which given a set of n objects in a metric space, one wants to find a subset of k distinct objects with the maximum sum of pairwise distances. We address this problem using the distributed framework known as randomized composable core-sets[3]. Unlike previous work, we study small-size core-set algorithms allowing minimum possible intermediate output size (and hence achieving large speed-up in the computation and increased parallelism), and at the same time, improving significantly over the approximation guarantees of state-of-the-art core-set-based algorithms. In particular, we present a simple distributed algorithm that achieves an almost optimal communication complexity, and asymptotically achieves approximation factor of 1/2, matching the best known global approximation factor for this problem. Our algorithms are scalable and practical as shown by our extensive empirical evaluation with large datasets and they can be easily used in the major distributed computing systems like MapReduce. Furthermore, we show empirically that, in real-life instances, using small-size core-set algorithms allows speed-ups up to >68 in running time w.r.t. to large-size core-sets while achieving close-to-optimal solutions with approximation factor of >90%.