Calculating clusters with AI methods

Clever Fellow

Article from Issue 145/2012
Author(s):

A human observer can register clusters in a two-dimensional set of points at a glance. Artificial intelligence has a harder time getting it done; however, the relatively simple k-means method delivers usable results.

Nature lovers who tagged along with the previous edition of this column and generated a map with all US national parks might subsequently ask themselves how they can tour all these attractions using as few resources as possible. Figure 1 shows that the parks are concentrated in certain areas. A tourist can thus visit about a dozen spectacles of nature by focusing on one area during a single visit.

Buy this article as PDF

Express-Checkout as PDF
Price $2.95
(incl. VAT)

Buy Linux Magazine

SINGLE ISSUES
 
SUBSCRIPTIONS
 
TABLET & SMARTPHONE APPS
Get it on Google Play

US / Canada

Get it on Google Play

UK / Australia

Related content

  • Machine Learning

    We explore some machine learning techniques with a simple missing person app.

  • Unsupervised Learning

    The most tedious part of supervised machine learning is providing sufficient supervision. However, if the samples come from a restricted sample space, unsupervised learning might be fine for the task.

  • Treasure Hunt

    A geolocation guessing game based on the popular Wordle evaluates a player's guesses based on the distance from and direction to the target location. Mike Schilli turns this concept into a desktop game in Go using the photos from his private collection.

  • Perl: Microformats

    Microformats add generally accepted tags, such as social network connections or geodetic coordinates, to HTML pages. Automated scripts collect them and help represent the data in graphically appealing ways – for example, geodata for vacation destinations.

  • KNIME

    They say data is "the new oil," but all that data you collect is only valuable if it leads to new insights. An open source analysis tool called KNIME lets you analyze data through graphical workflows – without the need for programming or complex spreadsheet manipulation.

comments powered by Disqus