I'm working on a data science project for my intro to Data Science class, and we've decided to tackle a problem relating to desalination plants in california: "Where should we place k plants to minimize the distance to zip codes?"
The data that we have so far is, zip, city, county, pop, lat, long, amount of water.
The issue is, I can't find any resources on how to force the centroid to be constrained to staying on the coast. What we've thought of so far is: Use a normal kmeans algorithm, but move the centroid to the coast once clusters have settled (bad) Use a normal kmeans algorithm with weights, making the coastal zips have infinite weight (I've been told this isn't a great solution)
What do you guys think?