An Accurate and Efficient Large-Scale Regression Method Through Best Friend Clustering

As the data size in Machine Learning fields grows exponentially, it is inevitable to accelerate the computation by utilizing the ever-growing large number of available cores provided by high-performance computing hardware. However, existing parallel methods for clustering or regression often suffer from problems of low accuracy, slow convergence, and complex hyperparameter-tuning. Furthermore, the parallel efficiency is usually difficult to improve while striking a balance between preserving model properties and partitioning computing workloads on distributed systems. In this article, we propose a novel and simple data structure capturing the most important information among data samples. It has several advantageous properties supporting a hierarchical clustering strategy that contains well-defined metrics for determining optimal hierarchy, balanced partition for maintaining the clustering property, and efficient parallelization for accelerating computation phases. Then we combine the clustering with regression techniques as a parallel library and utilize a hybrid structure of data and model parallelism to make predictions. Experiments illustrate that our library obtains remarkable performance on convergence, accuracy, and scalability.