Principal points analysis via p-median problem for binary data

Analysis with principal points is a useful statistical tool for summarizing large data. In this paper, we propose a subgradient-based algorithm to calculate a set of principal points for multivariate binary data by the formulating it as a p-median problem. This enables us to find a globally optimal set of principal points or an ε-optimal solution in the middle of the calculation by combining an upper bound found using the greedy method. This algorithm is an iterative procedure where each iteration can be calculated in an efficient manner. We investigate the applicability of the proposed framework with questionnaire data and arXiv co-authors data.