The k-Means Procedure

Suppose that we have n example feature vectors x1, x2, ..., xn all from the same class, and we know that they fall into k compact clusters, k < n. Let mi be the mean of the vectors in Cluster i. If the clusters are well separated, we can use a minimum-distance classifier to separate them. That is, we can say that x is in Cluster i if || x - mi || is the minimum of all the k distances. This suggests the following procedure for finding the k means: Here is an example showing how the means m1 and m2 move into the centers of two clusters.

This is a simple version of the k-means procedure. It can be viewed as a greedy algorithm for partitioning the n examples into k clusters so as to minimize the sum of the squared distances to the cluster centers. It does have some weaknesses.

This last problem is particularly troublesome, since we often have no way of knowing how many clusters exist. In the example shown above, the same algorithm applied to the same data produces the following 3-means clustering. Is it better or worse than the 2-means clustering? * The answer can only be found by designing two different classifiers -- one OR-ing together 2 subclasses and the other OR-ing together 3 subclasses -- and seeing which performs better.

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* If it turns out to be better, why stop with k = 3 or k = 4 ? If we go to the extreme of k = n, we wind up with what is called a nearest-neighbor classifier. If the number of examples is large enough, a nearest-neighbor classifier can perform excellently. However, it is computationally very expensive. This brings up the point that, like all engineering problems, classifier design is a compromise between price and performance.

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