3/14/24, 10:16 AM SAP HANA PAL – K-Means Algorithm or How to do Cust...

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call SYSTEM.afl_wrapper_generator('PAL_KMEANS_TELCO', 'AFLPAL', 'KMEANS', PDATA_TELCO);

After executing this code we should see a new procedure in the _SYS_AFL schema called PAL_KMEANS_TELCO

Run the K-Means Procedure

I generated the K-Means procedure so now I need to write the code that will execute it:

/* This table will contain the parameters that will be used

during the execution of the KMeans procedure.

For Eexample, the number of clusters you would like to use */

DROP TABLE PAL_CONTROL_TAB_TELCO;

CREATE COLUMN TABLE PAL_CONTROL_TAB_TELCO(

https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blogs-by-members/sap-hana-pal-k-means-algorithm-or-how -to-do-customer-segmentation-for-the/ba-p/12976696/page/2 11/39

3/14/24, 10:16 AM SAP HANA PAL – K-Means Algorithm or How to do Cust... - SAP Community

CALL PAL_KMEANS_TELCO(TELCO, PAL_CONTROL_TAB_TELCO, PAL_KMEANS_RESASSIGN_TAB_TELCO,

PAL_KMEANS_CENTERS_TAB_TELCO) with overview;

Pretty easy huh?

Identify the Right Number of Clusters

Ok, I have my code ready, but I’m missing a very important part, I still don’t know how many Ks I need to specify as the
input parameter (well, I do know because I created the sample data, but let’s pretend I don’t know). There are multiple
techniques to find out how many groups will produce the best clustering, in this case I will use the Elbow Criterion. The
elbow criterion is a common rule of thumb that says that one should choose a number of clusters so that adding another
cluster does not add sufficient information. I will run the code above specifying different number of clusters and for each run
I will measure the total intra-cluster distance. When the distance does not decrease much from one run to the other I will
know the number of groups I need to use. I built the chart below with the results:

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