An efficient enhanced k-means clustering algorithm

INTRODUCTION The huge amount of data collected and stored in databases increases the need for effective analysis methods to use the information contained implicitly there. One of the primary data analysis tasks is cluster analysis, intended to help a user understand the natural grouping or structure in a dataset. Therefore, the development of improved clustering algorithms has received much attention. The goal of a clustering algorithm is to group the objects of a database into a set of m…

An efficient enhanced k-means clustering algorithm

In k-means clustering, we are given a set of n data points in d-dimensional space R^d and an integer k and the problem is to determine a set of k points in R^d, called centers, so as to minimize the mean squared distance from each data point to its nearest center. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient clustering algorithm based on the k-means algorithm, which we call enhanced k-means algorithm. This algorithm is easy to implement, requiring a simple data structure to keep some information in each iteration to be used in the next iteration. Our experimental results demonstrated that our scheme can improve the computational speed of the k-means algorithm by the magnitude in the total number of distance calculations and the overall time of computation.