APPLICATIONS

OF K-MEANS
CLUSTERING
BUSINESS ANALYTICS
 CLUSTERING
What is clustering?
» Finding “natural” groupings between objects
» We want to find similar objects (f.e. documents) to treat
them in the same way
We aim at:
» High intra-cluster similarity
» Low inter-cluster similarity

For example: Web document

» A web search engine often returns thousands of pages in
response to a broad query, making it difficult for users to
browse or to identify relevant information.
» Clustering methods can be used to automatically group the
retrieved documents into a list of meaningful categories.
Is clustering typically …?
A. Supervised
B. Unsupervised
 k- Means Clustering
1. The k-means
clustering method is
an unsupervised machine k-means clustering aims to partition n
learning technique used observations into k clusters in which each
to identify clusters of data observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest
objects in a dataset. mean.
There are many different
Works for n-dimensional spaces as well
types of clustering
methods, but k-means is
one of the oldest and
most approachable.
These traits make
implementing k-means
clustering in Python
reasonably
straightforward, even for
novice programmers and
data scientists.
 K-means is a very important/basic flat clustering
How does K- algorithm.

means do the Its objective is to minimize the average squared

Euclidean distance of values from their cluster
clustering? centers where a cluster center is defined as the
mean or centroid of the values in a cluster :

.
 Tool support

A number of tools implementing k-

means clustering are available:

OPEN SOURCE PROPRIETARY

e.g. Apache Spark Torch, R, etc. e.g. MATLAB, Mathematica, SAP HANA
 Application of k-Means Clustering
1. Image
compression

Aim: compress an image in size

Question: with how many
dimensional space we are working
here?
 Applications of k-Means
Clustering
2. Retail –
recommendation and
yield management • User profiles/personas: • Product profiles: similar
similar purchase selling patterns
behavior

• Deciding when to
discount product
groups
Application of k-
03 Academic Performance
Means Clustering Based on the scores, students are
categorized into grades like A, B, or C.

Diagnostic systems
04 The medical profession uses k-means in
creating smarter medical decision support
systems, especially in the treatment of liver
ailments.
Search engines
05 Clustering forms a backbone of search
engines. When a search is performed, the
search results need to be grouped, and the
search engines very often use clustering to
do this.
Wireless sensor networks
06 The clustering algorithm plays the role of
finding the cluster heads, which collects all
the data in its respective cluster.
THANK YOU