Entropy K-Means Clustering With Feature Reduction Under Unknown Number of Clusters

The k-means algorithm with its extensions is the most used clustering method in the literature. But, the k-means and its various extensions are generally affected by initializations with a given number of clusters. On the other hand, most of k-means always treat data points with equal importance for feature components. There are several feature-weighted k-means proposed in literature, but, these feature-weighted k-means do not give a feature reduction behavior. In this paper, based on several entropy-regularized terms we can construct a novel k-means clustering algorithm, called Entropy-k-means, such that it can be free of initializations without a given number of clusters, and also has a feature reduction behavior. That is, the proposed Entropy-k-means algorithm can eliminate irrelevant features with feature reduction under free of initializations with automatically finding an optimal number of clusters. Comparisons between the proposed Entropy-k-means and other methods are made. Experimental results and comparisons actually demonstrate these good aspects of the proposed Entropy-k-means with its effectiveness and usefulness in practice.