Low-degree polynomials lower bounds for clustering in small dimension

Alexandra Carpentier, Nicolas Verzelen

We study the computational limits of clustering $n$ observations drawn from a mixture of $K$ isotropic distributions in $\mathbb R^d$, in the regime where the number $K$ of groups is much larger than the dimension $d$. In this regime, tensor-based procedures recover the partition with a polylogarithmic separation between the centers, but they require a sample size that is a large and non-explicit polynomial of $dK$, whereas the existing low-degree lower bounds only show that $n$ must be larger than $dK^2$. We introduce a mixture of $2K$ product Bernoulli distributions on $\{0,1\}^d$, with $K=(d+1)^m$, whose centers are built from a dual BCH code. This construction ensures that the moment tensors of the observations coincide with those of the uniform distribution on $\{-1,1\}^d$ up to the order $2m+1$. For any fixed $m$, we establish a low-degree polynomial lower bound showing that clustering is hard as long as the separation $Δ$ satisfies $Δ^2\ll(K^2d^{3/2}/n)^{1/(2m+2)}\wedge\sqrt d$, up to polylogarithmic factors. In particular, with a polylogarithmic separation, low-degree polynomials require $n\gtrsim K^2d^{3/2}$ observations, up to polylogarithmic factors. Through a…