Regularized K-means Through Hard-Thresholding

We study a framework for performing regularized K-means, based on direct penalization of the size of the cluster centers. Different penalization strategies are considered and compared in a theoretical analysis and an extensive Monte Carlo simulation study. Based on the results, we propose a new method called hard-threshold K-means (HTK-means), which uses an ℓ0 penalty to induce sparsity. HTK-means is a fast and competitive sparse clustering method which is easily interpretable, as is illustrated on several real data examples. In …

k-means thresholding