K-means Questions

• K-means clustering is a type of unsupervised learning, which is used when you

have unlabeled data (i.e., data without defined categories or groups). The goal
of this algorithm is to find groups in the data, with the number of groups
represented by the variable K. The algorithm works iteratively to assign each
data point to one of K groups based on the features that are provided. Data
points are clustered based on feature similarity. The results of the K-means
clustering algorithm are:
• The centroids of the K clusters, which can be used to label new data
• Labels for the training data (each data point is assigned to a single cluster)
• Rather than defining groups before looking at the data, clustering allows you to
find and analyze the groups that have formed organically. The "Choosing K"
section below describes how the number of groups can be determined.
• Each centroid of a cluster is a collection of feature values which define the
resulting groups. Examining the centroid feature weights can be used to
qualitatively interpret what kind of group each cluster represents.

K-means and Hierarchical Clustering: Slide 1

 Principal component analysis
• Principal component analysis - PCA belongs
to linear transforms based on the statistical
techniques. This method provides a
powerful tool for data analysis and pattern
recognition which is often used in signal and
image processing as a technique for data
compression, data dimension reduction or
their decorrelation as well.

K-means and Hierarchical Clustering: Slide 2

 Image pre processing
• Pre-processing is a common name for operations with
images at the lowest level of abstraction — both input and
output are intensity images. These iconic images are of the
same kind as the original data captured by the sensor, with
an intensity image usually represented by a matrix of
image function values (brightnesses). The aim of pre-
processing is an improvement of the image data that
suppresses unwilling distortions or enhances some image
features important for further processing, although
geometric transformations of images (e.g. rotation, scaling,
translation) are classified among pre-processing methods

Copyright © 2001, 2004, Andrew W. Moore K-means and Hierarchical Clustering: Slide 3