In allusion to the disadvantage of having to obtain the number of clusters of data sets in advance and the sensitivity to selecting initial clustering centers in the k-means algorithm, an improved k-means clustering algorithm is proposed. First, the concept of a silhouette coefficient is introduced, and the optimal clustering number Kopt of a data set with unknown class information is confirmed by calculating the silhouette coefficient of objects in clusters under different K values. Then the distribution of the data set is obtained through hierarchical clustering and the initial clustering-centers are confirmed. Finally, the clustering is completed by the traditional k-means clustering. By the theoretical analysis, it is proved that the improved k-means clustering algorithm has proper computational complexity. The experimental results of IRIS testing data set show that the algorithm can distinguish different clusters reasonably and recognize the outliers efficiently, and the entropy generated by the algorithm is lower.
