English Dictionary

The k-means procedure classifies a given data set by using a user defined number of clusters, k, a priori. The centroids can be placed randomly, or algorithmically, but it should be noted that the initial placement will affect the result. The next step is to analyze each point within the data set and group it with the nearest centroid according to some distance metric. When all points have been assigned to a group, a new centroid is calculated for each group as a barycenter of the cluster, resulting from the previous step. Once the k new centroids are calculated, the algorithm reiterates through the data set, and each sample is again assigned to a cluster based on its distance to the new centroids. This process is continued until the position of the centroids no longer change.