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LogoutThe k -medoids algorithm is a clustering algorithm related to the k-means algorithm and the medoidshift algorithm. Both the k-means and k-medoids algorithms are partitional (breaking the dataset up into groups). K -means attempts to minimize the total squared error, while k -medoids minimizes the sum of dissimilarities between points labeled to be in a cluster and a point designated as the center of that cluster. In contrast to the k-means algorithm, k-medoids chooses datapoints as centers (medoids or exemplars).
K-medoids is also a partitioning technique of clustering that clusters the data set of n objects into k clusters with k known a priori . A useful tool for determining k is the [silhouette]
It could be more robust to noise and outliers as compared to k-means because it minimizes a sum of general pairwise dissimilarities instead of a sum of squared Euclidean distances. The possible choice of the dissimilarity function is very rich but in our applet we used the Euclidean distance.
A medoid of a finite dataset is a data point from this set, whose average dissimilarity to all the data points is minimal i.e. it is the most centrally located point in the set.