ML 60: The Most Stable k Is Not the Number of Clusters
Disclosure: this post was written with the assistance of an AI system (Claude), which wrote the analysis code, ran the experiments and drafted the text. The topic, the constraints, the data choices and the final review are the author’s. k-means stability, the agreement between clusterings of two random 80% subsamples, chose k = 2 for one elongated Gaussian (stability 0.92) and k = 4 for a uniform square (0.94), neither of which has clusters....