Constrained K-Means Classification

Abstract

Classification-via-clustering (CvC) is a widely used method, using a clustering procedure to perform classification tasks. In this paper, a novel K-Means-based CvC algorithm is presented, analysed and evaluated. Two additional techniques are employed to reduce the effects of the limitations of K-Means. A hypercube of constraints is defined for each centroid and weights are acquired for each attribute of each class, for the use of a weighted Euclidean distance as a similarity criterion in the clustering procedure. Experiments are made with 42 well–known classification datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms CvC with simple K-Means.