K-means clustering is not a free lunch

http://varianceexplained.org/r/kmeans-free-lunch/

https://github.com/dgrtwo

http://varianceexplained.org/

• k-means assume the variance of the distribution of each attribute (variable) is spherical;

• all variables have the same variance;

• the prior probability for all k clusters are the same, i.e. each cluster has roughly equal number of observations; If any one of these 3 assumptions is violated, then k-means will fail.