K-means based Clustering Method with a Fixed Number of Cluster Members

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Clustering methods are very useful in many fields such as data mining, classification, and object recognition. Both the supervised and unsupervised grouping approaches can classify a series of sample data with a predefined or automatically assigned cluster number. However, there is no constraint on the number of elements for each cluster. Numbers of cluster members for each cluster obtained from clustering schemes are usually random. Thus, some clusters possess a large number of elements whereas others only have a few members. In some areas such as logistics management, a fixed number of members are preferred for each cluster or logistic center. Consequently, it is necessary to design a clustering method that can automatically adjust the number of group elements. In this paper, a k-means based clustering method with a fixed number of cluster members is proposed. In the proposed method, first, the data samples are clustered using the k-means algorithm. Then, the number of group elements is adjusted by employing a greedy strategy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed clustering scheme can classify data samples efficiently for a fixed number of cluster members.