A Novel Initial Clusters Generation Method for K-means-based Clustering Algorithms for Mixed Datasets
Mixed datasets consist of numeric and categorical attributes. Various K-means-based clustering algorithms have been developed to cluster these datasets. Generally, these clustering algorithms use random initial clusters which in turn produce different clustering results in different runs. A few cluster initialisation methods have been developed to compute initial clusters, however, they are either computationally expensive or they do not create the same clustering results in different runs. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to find initial clusters for K-means-based clustering algorithms for mixed datasets. The proposed approach is based on the observation that some data points in datasets remain in the same clusters created by K-means-based clustering algorithm irrespective of the choice of initial clusters. It is proposed that individual attribute information can be used to create initial clusters. A K-means-based clustering algorithm is run many times, in each run one of the attributes is used to create initial clusters. The clustering results of various runs are combined to produce a clustering result. This clustering result is used as initial clusters for a K-means-based clustering algorithm. Experiments with various categorical and mixed datasets showed that the proposed clustering approach produced accurate and consistent results. INDEX TERMS Mixed data, clustering, K-means, initialisation, random