Inertia simply means the sum of the squared distances from sample points to 
their cluster centroid. The smaller the inertia, the closer the cluster members 
are to their cluster centroid (that's also what KMeans optimizes when choosing 
centroids). In this context, the elbow method may be helpful 
(https://bl.ocks.org/rpgove/raw/0060ff3b656618e9136b/9aee23cc799d154520572b30443284525dbfcac5/)

Maybe also take a look at the silhouette metric for choosing K:
http://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/cluster/plot_kmeans_silhouette_analysis.html

Best,
Sebastian

> On Feb 20, 2018, at 5:14 PM, Shiheng Duan <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Yes, but what is used to decide the optimal output? I saw on the document, it 
> is the best output in terms of inertia. What does that mean? 
> Thanks. 
> 
> On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 7:46 PM, Joel Nothman <[email protected]> wrote:
> you can repeatedly use n_init=1?
> 
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