Derrick Burns created SPARK-3218:
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             Summary: K-Means clusterer can fail on degenerate data
                 Key: SPARK-3218
                 URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SPARK-3218
             Project: Spark
          Issue Type: Bug
          Components: MLlib
    Affects Versions: 1.0.2
            Reporter: Derrick Burns


The KMeans parallel implementation selects points to be cluster centers with 
probability weighted by their distance to cluster centers.  However, if there 
are fewer than k DISTINCT points in the data set, this approach will fail.  

Further, the recent checkin to work around this problem results in selection of 
the same point repeatedly as a cluster center. 

The fix is to allow fewer than k cluster centers to be selected.  This requires 
several changes to the code, as the number of cluster centers is woven into the 
implementation.

I have a version of the code that addresses this problem, AND generalizes the 
distance metric.  However, I see that there are literally hundreds of 
outstanding pull requests.  If someone will commit to working with me to 
sponsor the pull request, I will create it.




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