A K-means clustering algorithm for multivariate big data with correlated components

Common clustering algorithms require multiple scans of all the data to achieve convergence, and this is prohibitive when large databases, with millions of data, must be processed. Some algorithms to extend the popular K-means method to the analysis of big data are present in literature since the publication of (Bradley et al, Scaling clustering algorithms to large databases, 1998) but they assume that the random vectors which are processed and grouped have uncorrelated components. Unfortunately this is not the case in many practical situations. We here propose an extension of the algorithm of Bradley, Fayyad and Reina to the processing of massive multivariate data, having correlated components.