Interpreting k-means Results
After training our k-means algorithm, we will likely be interested in analyzing its results in more detail. Remember, the objective of cluster analysis is to group observations with similar patterns together. But how can we see whether the groupings found by the algorithm are meaningful? We will be looking at this in this section by using the dataset results we just generated.
One way of investigating this is to analyze the dataset row by row with the assigned cluster for each observation. This can be quite tedious, especially if the size of your dataset is quite big, so it would be better to have a kind of summary of the cluster results.
If you are familiar with Excel spreadsheets, you are probably thinking about using a pivot table to get the average of the variables for each cluster. In SQL, you would have probably used a GROUP BY
statement. If you are not familiar with either of these, you may think of grouping each cluster together and then...