learning the k in k-means - neural information processing.pdfVIP

Learning the k in k-means Greg Hamerly, Charles Elkan {ghamerly,elkan}@ Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of California, San Diego La Jolla, California 92093-0114 Abstract When clustering a dataset, the right number k of clusters to use is often not obvious, and choosing k automatically is a hard algorithmic prob- lem. In this paper we present an improved algorithm for learning k while clustering. The G-means algorithm is based on a statistical test for the hypothesis that a subset of data follows a Gaussian distribution. G-means runs k-means with increasing k in a hierarchical fashion until the test ac- cepts the hypothesis that the data assigned to each k-means center are Gaussian. Two key advantages are that the hypothesis test does not limit the covariance of the data and does not compute a full covariance matrix. Additionally, G-means only requires one intuitive parameter, the stand- ard statistical significance level α. We present results from experiments showing that the algorithm works well, and better than a recent method based on the BIC penalty for model complexity. In these experiments, we show that the BIC is ineffective as a scoring function, since it does not penalize strongly enough the model’s complexity. 1 Introduction and related work Clustering algorithms are useful tools for data mining, compression, probability density es- timation, and many other important tasks. However, most clustering algorithms require the user to specify the number of clusters (called k), and it is not always clear what is the best value for k. Figure 1 shows examples