  We describe the Median K-Flats (MKF) algorithm, a simple online method for
hybrid linear modeling, i.e., for approximating data by a mixture of flats.
This algorithm simultaneously partitions the data into clusters while finding
their corresponding best approximating l1 d-flats, so that the cumulative l1
error is minimized. The current implementation restricts d-flats to be
d-dimensional linear subspaces. It requires a negligible amount of storage, and
its complexity, when modeling data consisting of N points in D-dimensional
Euclidean space with K d-dimensional linear subspaces, is of order O(n K d D+n
d^2 D), where n is the number of iterations required for convergence
(empirically on the order of 10^4). Since it is an online algorithm, data can
be supplied to it incrementally and it can incrementally produce the
corresponding output. The performance of the algorithm is carefully evaluated
using synthetic and real data.
