Talk:Determining the number of clusters in a data set

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Additional updates coming

Latest comment: 16 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

A colleague will be adding details to the "Elbow method" and "Information criteria" subsections shortly. -JohnMeier (talk) 15:10, 9 April 2009 (UTC)Reply

Not that common problem

Latest comment: 13 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

There are lots of alternative algorithms that do not require the specification of k beforehand. This is mostly a problem of k-means, k-medoids and the EM-algorithm. Pretty much none of the more recent algorithms has this parameter. --Chire2 (talk) 14:13, 7 May 2010 (UTC)Reply

Any examples for such algorithms? thanks. Talgalili (talk) 12:36, 20 June 2010 (UTC)Reply

A well known, early example is the AutoClass algorithm, by Cheeseman et al. 1988, which applied a search-based method built around Expectation Maximization to find the Maximum A-Posteriori distribution as a function of the number of classes. More modern approaches to this problem would equivalently apply the Bayes Information Criterion to selecting k. Johnmark54 (talk) 15:26, 5 October 2011 (UTC)Reply