  We study two clustering problems, Starforest Editing, the problem of adding
and deleting edges to obtain a disjoint union of stars, and the generalization
Bicluster Editing. We show that, in addition to being NP-hard, none of the
problems can be solved in subexponential time unless the exponential time
hypothesis fails.
  Misra, Panolan, and Saurabh (MFCS 2013) argue that introducing a bound on the
number of connected components in the solution should not make the problem
easier: In particular, they argue that the subexponential time algorithm for
editing to a fixed number of clusters (p-Cluster Editing) by Fomin et al. (J.
Comput. Syst. Sci., 80(7) 2014) is an exception rather than the rule. Here, p
is a secondary parameter, bounding the number of components in the solution.
  However, upon bounding the number of stars or bicliques in the solution, we
obtain algorithms which run in time $2^{5 \sqrt{pk}} + O(n+m)$ for p-Starforest
Editing and $2^{O(p \sqrt{k} \log(pk))} + O(n+m)$ for p-Bicluster Editing. We
obtain a similar result for the more general case of t-Partite p-Cluster
Editing. This is subexponential in k for fixed number of clusters, since p is
then considered a constant.
  Our results even out the number of multivariate subexponential time
algorithms and give reasons to believe that this area warrants further study.
