Enhancement of the k-Means Clustering Speed by Emulation of Birds' Motion in Flock

Abstract

In an effort to improve the convergence speed in k-means clustering, we introduce the notion of the birds' movement in a flock. Their motion is characterized by the observation that each bird runs after his nearest neighbor. We utilize this feature in clustering procedure. Once the class of a vector is determined, then a number of vectors in the vicinity of it are assigned to the same class. Experiments have shown that the required number of iterations for termination is significantly lower in the proposed method than in the conventional one. Furthermore, the time of calculation per iteration is more than 5% shorter in the proposed case. The quality of the clustering, as determined from the total accumulated distance between the vector and its centroid vector, was found to be practically the same. It might be phrased that we may acquire practically the same clustering result with shorter computational time.