DIMK-means “Distance-based Initialization Method for K-means Clustering Algorithm”

Partition-based clustering technique is one of several clustering techniques that attempt to directly decompose the dataset into a set of disjoint clusters. K-means algorithm dependence on partition-based clustering technique is popular and widely used and applied to a variety of domains. K-means clustering results are extremely sensitive to the initial centroid; this is one of the major drawbacks of k-means algorithm. Due to such sensitivity; several different initialization approaches were proposed for the K-means algorithm in the last decades. This paper proposes a selection method for initial cluster centroid in K-means clustering instead of the random selection method. Research provides a detailed performance assessment of the proposed initialization method over many datasets with different dimensions, numbers of observations, groups and clustering complexities. Ability to identify the true clusters is the performance evaluation standard in this research. The experimental results show that the proposed initialization method is more effective and converges to more accurate clustering results than those of the random initialization method.