High-performance dynamic quantum clustering on graphics processors

Clustering methods in machine learning may benefit from borrowing metaphors from physics. Dynamic quantum clustering associates a Gaussian wave packet with the multidimensional data points and regards them as eigenfunctions of the Schrödinger equation. The clustering structure emerges by letting the system evolve and the visual nature of the algorithm has been shown to be useful in a range of applications. Furthermore, the method only uses matrix operations, which readily lend themselves to parallelization. In this paper, we develop an implementation on graphics hardware and investigate how this approach can accelerate the computations. We achieve a speedup of up to two magnitudes over a multicore CPU implementation, which proves that quantum-like methods and acceleration by graphics processing units have a great relevance to machine learning.