Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

In Search Of Star Clusters: An Introduction To The K-Means Algorithm, Marcio Nascimento

Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

This article is a gentle introduction to K-means, a mathematical technique of processing data for further classification. We begin with a brief historical introduction, where we find connections with Plato’s Timæus, von Linné’s binomial classification, and the star clustering concept of Mary Sommerville and collaborators. Artificial intelligence algorithms use K-means as a classification methodology to learn about data in a very accurate way, because it is a quantitative procedure based on similarities.