K-means training

Now that the RDD is ready for training, in the second part of the exercise, you'll train the RDD with PySpark's MLlib's KMeans algorithm. The algorithm is somewhat naive--it clusters the data into k clusters, even if k is not the right number of clusters to use. Therefore, when using k-means clustering, the most important parameter is a target number of clusters to generate, k. In practice, you rarely know the “true” number of clusters in advance, so the best practice is to try several values of k until the average intracluster distance stops decreasing dramatically

In this 2nd part, you'll test with k's ranging from 13 to 16 and use the elbow method to chose the correct k. The idea of the elbow method is to run k-means clustering on the dataset for a range of values of k, calculate Within Set Sum of Squared Error (WSSSE, this function is already provided to you) and select the best k based on the sudden drop in WSSSE. Finally, you'll retrain the model with the best k (15 in this case) and print the centroids (cluster centers).

Remember, you already have a SparkContext sc and rdd_split_int RDD available in your workspace.

Train the KMeans model with clusters from 13 to 16 and print the WSSSE for each cluster.
Train the KMeans model again with the best cluster (k=15).
Get the Cluster Centers (centroids) of KMeans model trained with k=15.

Take Hint (-30 XP)

Exercise

K-means training

Instructions