Can k-means clustering do classification?

Question

I want to know whether the k-means clustering algorithm can do classification?

If I have done a simple k-means clustering .

Assume I have many data , I use k

Answer 1

Here another method:

I saw it on "The Elements of Statistical Learning". I'll change the notation a little bit. Let C be the number of classes and K the number of clusters. Now, follow these steps:

1. Apply K-means clustering to the training data in each class seperately, using K clusters per class.
2. Assign a class label to each of the C*K clusters.
3. Classify observation x to the class of the closest cluster.

It seems like a nice approach for classification that reduces data observations by using clusters.