Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 451

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 70 of the 70 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

How much can k-means be improved by using better initialization and repeats?

Open access
Fränti, Pasi, Sieranoja, Sami·2019·Pattern Recognition

Abstract

In this paper, we study what are the most important factors that deteriorate the performance of the k-means algorithm, and how much this deterioration can be overcome either by using a better initialization technique, or by repeating (restarting) the algorithm. Our main finding is that when the clusters overlap, k-means can be significantly improved using these two tricks. Simple furthest point heuristic (Maxmin) reduces the number of erroneous clusters from 15% to 6%, on average, with our clustering benchmark. Repeating the algorithm 100 times reduces it further down to 1%. This accuracy is more than enough for most pattern recognition applications. However, when the data has well separated clusters, the performance of k-means depends completely on the goodness of the initialization. Therefore, if high clustering accuracy is needed, a better algorithm should be used instead.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.patcog.2019.04.014

Cites

70 of 70 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 70 references

Cited by

See all 451

Metadata

Authors
Fränti, P., & Sieranoja, S.
Venue
Pattern Recognition
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2019-09
Volume
93
Pages
95-112
ISSN
0031-3203 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2940320374
Cited by
451
References
70
FWCI
24.98
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
hybrid

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How much can k-means be improved by using better initialization and repeats? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.patcog.2019.04.014
The paper
Fränti, P., & Sieranoja, S. (2019). How much can k-means be improved by using better initialization and repeats? Pattern Recognition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2019.04.014

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.