K-means Clustering (from "R in Action")

In R’s partitioning approach, observations are divided into K groups and reshuffled to form the most cohesive clusters possible according to a given criterion. There are two methods—K-means and partitioning around mediods (PAM). In this article, based on chapter 16 of R in Action, Second Edition, author Rob Kabacoff discusses K-means clustering.

In R’s partitioning approach, observations are divided into K groups and reshuffled to form the most cohesive clusters possible according to a given criterion. There are two methods—K-means and partitioning around mediods (PAM). In this article, based on chapter 16 of R in Action, Second Edition, author Rob Kabacoff discusses K-means clustering.

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K-means clustering

The most common partitioning method is the K-means cluster analysis. Conceptually, the K-means algorithm:

  1. Selects K centroids (K rows chosen at random)
  2. Assigns each data point to its closest centroid
  3. Recalculates the centroids as the average of all data points in a cluster (i.e., the centroids are p-length mean vectors, where p is the number of variables)
  4. Assigns data points to their closest centroids
  5. Continues steps 3 and 4 until the observations are not reassigned or the maximum number of iterations (R uses 10 as a default) is reached.

Implementation details for this approach can vary.

R uses an efficient algorithm by Hartigan and Wong (1979) that partitions the observations into k groups such that the sum of squares of the observations to their assigned cluster centers is a minimum. This means that in steps 2 and 4, each observation is assigned to the cluster with the smallest value of:

equation_1_RinAction2CH16

Where k is the cluster,xij is the value of the jth variable for the ith observation, and xkj-bar is the mean of the jth variable for the kth cluster.

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