{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/exkmc-expanding-explainable-k-means","title":"ExKMC: Expanding Explainable $k$-Means Clustering","arxiv_id":"2006.02399","date":"2020-06-03","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nave Frost","Michal Moshkovitz","Cyrus Rashtchian"],"abstract":"Despite the popularity of explainable AI, there is limited work on effective methods for unsupervised learning. We study algorithms for $k$-means clustering, focusing on a trade-off between explainability and accuracy. Following prior work, we use a small decision tree to partition a dataset into $k$ clusters. This enables us to explain each cluster assignment by a short sequence of single-feature thresholds. While larger trees produce more accurate clusterings, they also require more complex explanations. To allow flexibility, we develop a new explainable $k$-means clustering algorithm, ExKMC, that takes an additional parameter $k' \\geq k$ and outputs a decision tree with $k'$ leaves. We use a new surrogate cost to efficiently expand the tree and to label the leaves with one of $k$ clusters. We prove that as $k'$ increases, the surrogate cost is non-increasing, and hence, we trade explainability for accuracy. Empirically, we validate that ExKMC produces a low cost clustering, outperforming both standard decision tree methods and other algorithms for explainable clustering. Implementation of ExKMC available at https://github.com/navefr/ExKMC.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.02399v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.02399v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"exkmc-expanding-explainable-k-means","repo_url":"https://github.com/navefr/ExKMC","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"paper_slug":"exkmc-expanding-explainable-k-means","repo_url":"https://github.com/lmurtinho/ExKMC","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"clustering","task_name":"Clustering"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2006.02399","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2006.02399"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/lmurtinho/ExKMC","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/navefr/ExKMC","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"ran_violates":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"6998c9ef41480a73","entry":"convert_input","repo":"navefr/ExKMC","repo_kind":"official","path":"ExKMC/Tree.py","file_url":"https://github.com/navefr/ExKMC/blob/HEAD/ExKMC/Tree.py","link_basis":"plan_row","language":"python","status":"ran_violates","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"VIOLATES","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"6998c9ef41480a73"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}