Segmentation problems

Abstract
We study a novel genre of optimization problems, which we call segmentation problems , motivated in part by certain aspects of clustering and data mining. For any classical optimization problem, the corresponding segmentation problem seeks to partition a set of cost vectors into several segments , so that the overall cost is optimized. We focus on two natural and interesting (but MAXSNP-complete) problems in this class, the hypercube segmentation problem and the catalog segmentation problem, and present approximation algorithms for them. We also present a general greedy scheme, which can be specialized to approximate any segmentation problem.

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