Abstract
Clustering is one of the most important tasks in data mining. The K-means algorithm is the most popular one for achieving this task because of its efficiency. However, it works only on numeric values although data sets in data mining often contain categorical values. Responding to this fact, the K-modes algorithm is presented to extend the K-means algorithm to categorical domains. Unfortunately, it suffers from computing the dissimilarity between each pair of objects and the mode of each cluster. Aiming at addressing these problems confronting K-modes, we present a new algorithm called K-distributions in this paper. We experimentally tested K-distributions using the well known 36 UCI data sets selected by Weka, and compared it to K-modes. The experimental results show that K-distributions significantly outperforms K-modes in term of clustering accuracy and log likelihood.
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Cai, Z., Wang, D., Jiang, L. (2007). K-Distributions: A New Algorithm for Clustering Categorical Data. In: Huang, DS., Heutte, L., Loog, M. (eds) Advanced Intelligent Computing Theories and Applications. With Aspects of Artificial Intelligence. ICIC 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 4682. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74205-0_48
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74205-0_48
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