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The term "k-means" was first used by James MacQueen in 1967, [2] though the idea goes back to Hugo Steinhaus in 1956. [3]The standard algorithm was first proposed by Stuart Lloyd of Bell Labs in 1957 as a technique for pulse-code modulation, although it was not published as a journal article until 1982. [4]
In data mining, k-means++ [1] [2] is an algorithm for choosing the initial values (or "seeds") for the k-means clustering algorithm. It was proposed in 2007 by David Arthur and Sergei Vassilvitskii, as an approximation algorithm for the NP-hard k-means problem—a way of avoiding the sometimes poor clusterings found by the standard k-means algorithm.
The average silhouette of the data is another useful criterion for assessing the natural number of clusters. The silhouette of a data instance is a measure of how closely it is matched to data within its cluster and how loosely it is matched to data of the neighboring cluster, i.e., the cluster whose average distance from the datum is lowest. [8]
Most k-means-type algorithms require the number of clusters – k – to be specified in advance, which is considered to be one of the biggest drawbacks of these algorithms. Furthermore, the algorithms prefer clusters of approximately similar size, as they will always assign an object to the nearest centroid.
Fuzzy clustering (also referred to as soft clustering or soft k-means) is a form of clustering in which each data point can belong to more than one cluster.. Clustering or cluster analysis involves assigning data points to clusters such that items in the same cluster are as similar as possible, while items belonging to different clusters are as dissimilar as possible.
scikit-learn (formerly scikits.learn and also known as sklearn) is a free and open-source machine learning library for the Python programming language. [3] It features various classification, regression and clustering algorithms including support-vector machines, random forests, gradient boosting, k-means and DBSCAN, and is designed to interoperate with the Python numerical and scientific ...
Example of the typical "elbow" pattern used for choosing the number of clusters even emerging on uniform data. Even on uniform random data (with no meaningful clusters) the curve follows approximately the ratio 1/k where k is the number of clusters parameter, causing users to see an "elbow" to mistakenly choose some "optimal" number of clusters.
The name was coined by Leonard Kaufman and Peter J. Rousseeuw with their PAM (Partitioning Around Medoids) algorithm. [1] Both the k-means and k-medoids algorithms are partitional (breaking the dataset up into groups) and attempt to minimize the distance between points labeled to be in a cluster and a point designated as the center of that cluster.