Machine Learning, as a branch of Artificial Intelligence, enables the computer system to learn from the data without being explicitly programmed. One of its most popular algorithms, K-means, is a clustering algorithm that can help classify similar data points and group them together.
K-means is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm that is widely used for clustering tasks in various domains, such as computer vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and recommendation systems. It aims to partition a given dataset into K clusters where each object belongs to a cluster whose mean is closest to it. In other words, it tries to find K centroids (mean points) that represent the different clusters in the data.
The following are the significant steps of K-means algorithm:
– Initialization – Initially, k points are randomly chosen from the given dataset as the centroids of the clusters.
– Assignment – Each data point is assigned to the nearest centroid, and the group of points assigned to the same centroid forms a cluster.
– Recalculation – After the assignment step is complete, the mean for each group of data points in a particular cluster is calculated, and that becomes the new centroid of that cluster.
– Termination – The algorithm continues this process until the centroids no longer change, and each data point is part of the cluster with the closest centroid.
There are various techniques to measure the similarity between the data points and the centroids. The most common method uses Euclidean distance to calculate the similarity.
K-means algorithm has some significant advantages:
– It is computationally efficient and can provide highly accurate results in a short amount of time.
– It can handle large datasets and millions of data points.
– It is easy to understand and implement.
However, K-means algorithm also has some limitations:
– The algorithm can get stuck in a local minimum, i.e., it may not always converge to the global minimum, which can result in suboptimal clusters.
– It is challenging to determine the optimal value of K, the number of clusters, as it needs to be set before the algorithm is run.
– It is sensitive to initial centroid selection.
In conclusion, K-means is a popular and useful algorithm in machine learning, used to identify patterns in large datasets. The algorithm involves grouping the data into clusters based on the similarity of the data points with the centroids. Although K-means has some limitations, it has proven to be effective in various applications, and it is a go-to algorithm for many data scientists.