Papers › Merging K-means with hierarchical clustering for identifying general-shaped groups

Merging K-means with hierarchical clustering for identifying general-shaped groups

23 Dec 2017arXiv:1712.08786archive 2025-07-28

Anna D. Peterson, Arka P. Ghosh, Ranjan Maitra

Clustering partitions a dataset such that observations placed together in a group are similar but different from those in other groups. Hierarchical and K-means clustering are two approaches but have different strengths and weaknesses. For instance, hierarchical clustering identifies groups in a tree-like structure but suffers from computational complexity in large datasets while K-means clustering is efficient but designed to identify homogeneous spherically-shaped clusters. We present a hybrid non-parametric clustering approach that amalgamates the two methods to identify general-shaped clusters and that can be applied to larger datasets. Specifically, we first partition the dataset into spherical groups using K-means. We next merge these groups using hierarchical methods with a data-driven distance measure as a stopping criterion. Our proposal has the potential to reveal groups with general shapes and structure in a dataset. We demonstrate good performance on several simulated and real datasets.

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