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Local Optima in K-Means Clustering: What You Don't Know May Hurt You.
Abstract
The popular K-means clustering method, as implemented in 3 commercial software packages (SPSS, SYSTAT, and SAS), generally provides solutions that are only locally optimal for a given set of data. Because none of these commercial implementations offer a reasonable mechanism to begin the K-means method at alternative starting points, separate routines were written within the MATLAB (Math-Works, 1999) environment that can be initialized randomly (these routines are provided at the end of the online version of this article in the PsycARTICLES database). Through the analysis of 2 empirical data sets and 810 simulated data sets, it is shown that the results provided by commercial packages are most likely locally optimal. These results suggest the need for some strategy to study the local optima problem for a specific data set or to identify methods for finding "good" starting values that might lead to the best solutions possible.
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Cited by
Campbell, R., Greeson, M. R., Bybee, D., & Raja, S. (2008) · Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-006x.76.2.194 · Cited by 291
Increasing sample size compensates for data problems in segmentation studies
Dolnicar, S., Grün, B., & Leisch, F. (2016) · Journal of Business Research · doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2015.09.004 · Cited by 131
A Monte Carlo evaluation of weighted community detection algorithms
Gates, K. M., Henry, T., Steinley, D., & Fair, D. A. (2016) · Frontiers in Neuroinformatics · doi:10.3389/fninf.2016.00045 · Cited by 106
“An important note is that the algorithm begins by randomly placing individuals into communities; thus multiple runs on the same data may remit different solutions and the ordering may have implications for the reliability of the solution (Steinley, 2003).”
MethodSelf-citation
Metadata
- Authors
- Steinley, D.
- Venue
- Psychological Methods
- Published
- 2003
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 294-304
- ISSN
- 1082-989X (ISSN-L)
- 1939-1463
- OpenAlex
- W1987019005
- Cited by
- 269
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 9.54
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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