K-means clustering

k-means clustering is a method of vector quantization, originally from signal processing, that aims to partition n observations into k clusters in which each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean (cluster centers or cluster centroid), serving as a prototype of the cluster. This results in a partitioning of the data space into Voronoi cells. k-means clustering minimizes within-cluster variances (squared Euclidean distances), but not regular Euclidean distances, which would be the more difficult Weber problem: the mean optimizes squared errors, whereas only the geometric median minimizes Euclidean distances. For instance, better Euclidean solutions can be found using k-medians and k-medoids. The problem is computationally difficult (NP-hard); however, efficient heuristic algorithms converge quickly to a local optimum. These are usually similar to the expectation-maximization algorithm for mixtures of Gaussian distributions via an iterative refinement approach employed by both k-means and Gaussian mixture modeling. They both use cluster centers to model the data; however, k-means clustering tends to find clusters of comparable spatial extent, while the Gaussian mixture model allows clusters to have different shapes. The unsupervised k-means algorithm has a loose relationship to the k-nearest neighbor classifier, a popular supervised machine learning technique for classification that is often confused with k-means due to the name. Applying the 1-nearest neighbor classifier to the cluster centers obtained by k-means classifies new data into the existing clusters. This is known as nearest centroid classifier or Rocchio algorithm. Given a set of observations (x1, x2, ..., xn), where each observation is a d-dimensional real vector, k-means clustering aims to partition the n observations into k (≤ n) sets S = {S1, S2, ..., Sk} so as to minimize the within-cluster sum of squares (WCSS) (i.e. variance). Formally, the objective is to find: where μi is the mean (also called centroid) of points in , i.e.