Papers › Global k-means$++$: an effective relaxation of the global k-means clustering algorithm

Global k-means$++$: an effective relaxation of the global k-means clustering algorithm

22 Nov 2022arXiv:2211.12271archive 2025-07-28

Georgios Vardakas, Aristidis Likas

The k-means algorithm is a prevalent clustering method due to its simplicity, effectiveness, and speed. However, its main disadvantage is its high sensitivity to the initial positions of the cluster centers. The global k-means is a deterministic algorithm proposed to tackle the random initialization problem of k-means but its well-known that requires high computational cost. It partitions the data to K clusters by solving all k-means sub-problems incrementally for all k=1,…, K. For each k cluster problem, the method executes the k-means algorithm N times, where N is the number of datapoints. In this paper, we propose the \emph{global k-means\texttt{++}} clustering algorithm, which is an effective way of acquiring quality clustering solutions akin to those of global k-means with a reduced computational load. This is achieved by exploiting the center selection probability that is effectively used in the k-means\texttt{++} algorithm. The proposed method has been tested and compared in various benchmark datasets yielding very satisfactory results in terms of clustering quality and execution speed.

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