Fouad Khan

Fouad Khan

Recently it has been demonstrated that causal entropic forces can lead to the emergence of complex phenomena associated with human cognitive niche such as tool use and social cooperation. Here I show that even more fundamental traits associated with human cognition such as 'self-awareness' can easily be demonstrated to be arising out of merely a selection for 'better regulators'; i.e. systems which respond comparatively better to threats to their existence which are internal to themselves. A simple model demonstrates how indeed the average self-awareness for a universe of systems continues to rise as less self-aware systems are eliminated. The model also demonstrates however that the maximum attainable self-awareness for any system is limited by the plasticity and energy availability for that typology of systems. I argue that this rise in self-awareness may be the reason why systems tend towards greater complexity.

Fouad Khan

K-means is one of the most widely used clustering algorithms in various disciplines, especially for large datasets. However the method is known to be highly sensitive to initial seed selection of cluster centers. K-means++ has been proposed to overcome this problem and has been shown to have better accuracy and computational efficiency than k-means. In many clustering problems though -such as when classifying georeferenced data for mapping applications- standardization of clustering methodology, specifically, the ability to arrive at the same cluster assignment for every run of the method i.e. replicability of the methodology, may be of greater significance than any perceived measure of accuracy, especially when the solution is known to be non-unique, as in the case of k-means clustering. Here we propose a simple initial seed selection algorithm for k-means clustering along one attribute that draws initial cluster boundaries along the 'deepest valleys' or greatest gaps in dataset. Thus, it incorporates a measure to maximize distance between consecutive cluster centers which augments the conventional k-means optimization for minimum distance between cluster center and cluster members. Unlike existing initialization methods, no additional parameters or degrees of freedom are introduced to the clustering algorithm. This improves the replicability of cluster assignments by as much as 100% over k-means and k-means++, virtually reducing the variance over different runs to zero, without introducing any additional parameters to the clustering process. Further, the proposed method is more computationally efficient than k-means++ and in some cases, more accurate.