Density based initialization method for K-means Clustering algorithm

Abstract

Data clustering is a basic technique to show the structure of a data set. K-means clustering is a widely acceptable method of data clustering, which follow a partitioned approach for dividing the given data set into non-overlapping groups. Unfortunately, it has the pitfall of randomly choosing the initial cluster centers. Due to its gradient nature, this algorithm is highly sensitive to the initial seed value. In this paper, we propose a kernel density-based method to compute an initial seed value for the k-means algorithm. The idea is to select an initial point from the denser region because they truly reflect the property of the overall data set. Subsequently, we are avoiding the selection of outliers as an initial seed value. We have verified the proposed method on real data sets with the help of different internal and external validity measures. The experimental analysis illustrates that the proposed method has better performance over the kmeans, k-means++ algorithm, and other recent initialization methods.