40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

The steps of the k-means algorithm

The steps involved in the k-means clustering algorithm are as follows:

Step 1	We choose the number of clusters, k.
Step 2	Among the data points, we randomly choose k points as cluster centers.
Step 3	Based on the selected distance measure, we iteratively compute the distance from each point in the problem space to each of the k cluster centers. Based on the size of the dataset, this may be a time-consuming step—for example, if there are 10,000 points in the cluster and k = 3, this means that 30,000 distances need to be calculated.
Step 4	We assign each data point in the problem space to the nearest cluster center.
Step 5	Now each data point in our problem space has an assigned cluster center. ...