K-means algorithm variation with equal cluster size

Question

I\'m looking for the fastest algorithm for grouping points on a map into equally sized groups, by distance. The k-means clustering algorithm looks straightforward and promis

Answer 1

You can view the distances as defining a weighted graph. Quite a few graph partitioning algorithms are explicitly based on trying to partition the graph vertices into two sets of equal size. This appears in, for example, the Kernighan-Lin algorithm and in spectral graph partitioning using the Laplacian. To get multiple clusters, you can recursively apply the partitioning algorithm; there's a nice discussion of this at the link on spectral graph partitioning.