seniorK-Means Clustering
Why is K-Means not invariant to feature rotation?
Updated May 16, 2026
Short answer
K-Means is not rotation-invariant because Euclidean distance depends on coordinate axes alignment.
Deep explanation
Rotating feature space changes axis-aligned distances even though true geometric relationships remain the same. Since K-Means relies on axis-aligned variance minimization, rotated datasets can yield different clustering results.
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