This paper shows that one can be competitive with the kmeans objective while operating online. In this model, the algorithm receives vectors v1, . . . , vn one by one in an arbitrary order. For each vector vt the algorithm outputs a cluster identifier before receiving vt+1. Our online algorithm generates Õ(k) clusters whose k-means cost is Õ(W ∗) where W ∗ is the optimal k-means cost using k cl...

Over half a century old and showing no signs of aging, k-means remains one of the most popular data processing algorithms. As is well-known, a proper initialization of k-means is crucial for obtaining a good final solution. The recently proposed k-means++ initialization algorithm achieves this, obtaining an initial set of centers that is provably close to the optimum solution. A major downside ...

We provide a clustering algorithm that approximately optimizes the k-means objective, in the one-pass streaming setting. We make no assumptions about the data, and our algorithm is very light-weight in terms of memory, and computation. This setting is applicable to unsupervised learning on massive data sets, or resource-constrained devices. The two main ingredients of our theoretical work are: ...

In this paper, we compare three initialization schemes for the KMEANS clustering algorithm: 1) random initialization (KMEANSRAND), 2) KMEANS++, and 3) KMEANSD++. Both KMEANSRAND and KMEANS++ have a major that the value of k needs to be set by the user of the algorithms. (Kang 2013) recently proposed a novel use of determinantal point processes for sampling the initial centroids for the KMEANS a...

The k-means++ seeding algorithm is one of the most popular algorithms that is used for finding the initial k centers when using the k-means heuristic. The algorithm is a simple sampling procedure and can be described as follows: Pick the first center randomly from among the given points. For i > 1, pick a point to be the i center with probability proportional to the square of the Euclidean dist...

Resumen. Sin lugar a duda el algoritmo K-means es el más utilizado en la comunidad de aprendizaje no supervisado. Desafortunadamente es muy sensible a la selección de los centroides iniciales. Debido a ello, se han propuesto un gran número de métodos para la selección de los centros iniciales. En este artículo se presenta un algoritmo de agrupamiento que tiene como base al algoritmo K-means, en...

Clustering sets of histograms has become popular thanks to the success of the generic method of bag-of-X used in text categorization and in visual categorization applications. In this paper, we investigate the use of a parametric family of distortion measures, called the α-divergences, for clustering histograms. Since it usually makes sense to deal with symmetric divergences in information retr...

We run experiments showing that algorithm clarans (Ng et al., 2005) finds better Kmedoids solutions than the standard algorithm. This finding, along with the similarity between the standard K-medoids and K-means algorithms, suggests that clarans may be an effective K-means initializer. We show that this is the case, with clarans outperforming other popular seeding algorithms on 23/23 datasets w...

Much work has sought to discern the different types of cloud regimes, typically via Euclidean k-means clustering of histograms. However, these methods ignore the underlying similarity structure of cloud types. Wasserstein k-means clustering is a promising candidate for utilizing this structure during clustering, but existing algorithms do not scale well and lack the quality guarantees of the Eu...