Approximate k values using Repulsive Force without Domain Knowledge in k-means

• Jung-Jae Kim,
• Minwoo Ryu,
• Si-Ho Cha,

Vol. 14, No. 3, March 31, 2020
10.3837/tiis.2020.03.004, Download Paper (Free):

• clustering
• K-means algorithm
• Machine Learning
• repulsive force

Abstract

The k-means algorithm is widely used in academia and industry due to easy and simple implementation, enabling fast learning for complex datasets. However, k-means struggles to classify datasets without prior knowledge of specific domains. We proposed the repulsive k-means (RK-means) algorithm in a previous study to improve the k-means algorithm, using the repulsive force concept, which allows deleting unnecessary cluster centroids. Accordingly, the RK-means enables to classifying of a dataset without domain knowledge. However, three main problems remain. The RK-means algorithm includes a cluster repulsive force offset, for clusters confined in other clusters, which can cause cluster locking; we were unable to prove RK-means provided optimal convergence in the previous study; and RK-means shown better performance only normalize term and weight. Therefore, this paper proposes the advanced RK-means (ARK-means) algorithm to resolve the RK-means problems. We establish an initialization strategy for deploying cluster centroids and define a metric for the ARK-means algorithm. Finally, we redefine the mass and normalize terms to close to the general dataset. We show ARK-means feasibility experimentally using blob and iris datasets. Experiment results verify the proposed ARK-means algorithm provides better performance than k-means, k’-means, and RK-means.

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