Solved – Memory requirements of $k$-means clustering

clusteringk-means

Can anyone tell me the factors that affect the memory requirements of $k$-means clustering with a bit of explanation?

Best Answer

Algorithms like Lloyds can be implemented with $k\cdot(2\cdot d + 1)$ floating point values memory use only. MacQueens k-means algorithm should only need $k\cdot(d + 1)$ memory.

However, as most users will want to know which point belongs to which cluster, almost every implementation you'll find will use $O(n+k\cdot d)$ memory.

In other words, the memory use by k-means is essentially the output data size.

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