Clustering
5.1 INTRODUCTION
Clustering is similar to classification in that data are grouped. However, unlike classification, the groups are not predefined. Instead, the grouping is accomplished by finding similarities between data according to characteristics found in the actual data. The groups are called clusters. Some authors view clustering as a special type of classification. In this text, however, we follow a more conventional view in that the two are different. Many definitions for clusters have been proposed:
Set of like elements. Elements from different clusters are not alike. The distance between points in a cluster is less than the distance between a point in the cluster and any point outside it. A term similar to clustering is database segmentation, where like tuple (record) in a database are grouped together. This is done to partition or segment the database into components that then give the user a more general view of the data. In this case text, we do not differentiate between segmentation and clustering. A simple example of clustering is found in Example 5.1. This example illustrates the fact that that determining how to do the clustering is not straightforward.
As illustrated in Figure 5.1, a given set of data may be clustered on different attributes. Here a group of homes in a geographic area is shown. The first floor type of clustering is based on the location of the home. Homes that are geographically close to each other are clustered together. In the second clustering, homes are grouped based on the size of the house.
Clustering has been used in many application domains, including biology, medicine, anthropology, marketing, and economics. Clustering applications include plant and animal classification, disease classification, image processing, pattern recognition, and document retrieval. One of the first domains in which clustering
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