• Below, is a dataset in 2 dimensions with 8000 points in it. We will run 5-means on it (K-means with K=5). In addition to the points we see K-means has selected 5 random points for class centers. This are the fat blue, green, red, black, and purple points. Notice that, as chance has it, they do not correspond to the underlying Gaussians (as a matter of fact I had to coerce the program to produce those "bad" initial points - it is fairly good at getting the initial points "right").

  Now, the program goes over datapoints, associating each one with the class center closest to it. The points you see are colored according to the center they're associated with. Notice the blue-green boundary at the top right-hand corner. This (theoretical) line of points which are equidistant from the green and blue centers determines which point belongs where.

  The next step of the algorithm is to re-position the class centers. The green center will be placed at the center of mass of all green points, and so on. As it turns out, the green center will shift to the right and upwards. The black line going out from the green center shows this. Notice the black and red centers each share about half of the Gaussian on the left (and about a half of the Gaussian they're in), so they both "race" to the left. The purple center's movement is very small.

  Click on the image to see a larger version. You can open it in a new browser window, so you can still read the text.

  

• See below what happens after the first iteration. The program moved the centers, and re-colored all points according to which center is closest to each. Since the green center has moved, the blue-green boundary passes "outside" of the Gaussian on the top-right-hand corner. And is probably somewhere in the unpopulated area between blue and green. We want this kind of thing to happen.

  By looking at the movement vectors, you can see the black and red will continue racing to the left, and the purple now dominates a good part of its surroundings. Notice the "orphan" Gaussian between purple and green. This happened because black and red reside in the same Gaussian, so we're "short" one centroid.

  

• The green-purple boundary shifts upward and to the right; looks like green is going to own just "its" points and purple will own two Gaussians. On the bottom left-hand corner, it looks like red had lost the race to black (black is more to the left).

  

  Another iteration...

  

  Now the blue-green and green-purple boundaries are pretty much set (to what they should be). Notice that red will shift, ever so slightly, to the right.

  

  Red has gone to the right. So it gained more purple points. Since all of the purple points are to its right, this effect intensifies. Consequently, purple is losing points to the red, and moves right (and up) as well.

  

  Another iteration...

  

  And another one...

  

  And another one...

  

  The red has completed its journey, gaining control over a Gaussian previously owned by purple. Black gets to own the entire Gaussian on the left. K-means has found the "correct" partition. Since this is a stable configuration, the next iterations will not move the centers too much.

  

Again, our dataset of 8000 randomly-generated points, from a 5-Gaussian distribution. You should see the underlying Gaussians. The blue boundary denotes the "root" kd-node. It encompasses all of the points.



Now see the children of the root node. Each is a rectangle, with the splitting line parallel to the Y axis about half-way through.



Now you see the grand-children of the root. Each one is a split of its parent, along the X-axis this time.



And so on, splitting on alternating dimensions...















Here are the first seven layers of KD-tree, all in one picture.

All the explanations in the K-means demo above were true for traditional K-means. "Traditional" means that when you go out and decide which center is closest to each point (ie, determine colors), you do it the naive way: for each point, compute distances to all the centers and find the minimum. Our program is much smarter then that. It first builds a kd-tree for the points (the one you saw earlier). Now assume that some kd-node is entirely owned by some center. This means that the next center movement will be affected by the center of mass of the points in that kd-node (and their number). So, by pre-computing the center of mass of each kd-node, and storing it in the node, we can save a lot of work. [showing that some node is entirely owned by a center can also be done efficiently -- see the fast K-means paper].

This kind of fast computation has been going on behind the scenes throughout the demo. Whenever a node was proven to be fully owned by a center, the program drew that node's rectangle. For visualization purposes it also drew the points inside it, but a "real" program doesn't need to do that. It just uses a very small constant number of arithmetic operations to compute the effect a certain kd-node will have. This is opposed to summing the coordinates of each and every point inside that rectangle, that is, a cost which is linear in the number of points in the rectangle.

Notice how easy it was to compute the black and blue centers-of-mass. The black took just two nodes, and about 50 additional individual points. The blue took 5 nodes, plus about 10 points. Compare this with the roughly 8000/5 = 1600 points each one has (and doing 5 distances for each!).

Another interesting thing to notice is how these rectangles get smaller as we approach the theoretical boundary line we talked about before. Watch the red-purple boundary. As we get closer to it, it's harder and harder for big, fat nodes to be owned entirely by either red or purple. If you think about it, they can't be owned entirely by either center if this boundary intersects them. So, the closer we get to the boundary, the smaller the rectangles. And it's pretty much individual points very close to the boundary.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0121671.
Romanian translation courtesy of azoft
Hungarian translation courtesy of Zsolt Boros
Italian translation courtesy of Dante Ale
German translation courtesy of Gameperiod.com
Spanish translation courtesy of Coupon Goo
Portuguese translation courtesy of Artur Weber