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What Is Cluster Analysis?: - Cluster: A Collection of Data Objects

Cluster analysis is an unsupervised machine learning technique that groups unlabeled data points into clusters. The goal is to categorize data points so that objects within the same cluster are as similar as possible, while objects in different clusters are as dissimilar as possible. There are several different clustering algorithms, including partitioning methods like k-means that iteratively assign data points to clusters based on centroid distances until cluster membership stabilizes. Clustering has many applications in fields like marketing, city planning, and earthquake studies.

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70 views9 pages

What Is Cluster Analysis?: - Cluster: A Collection of Data Objects

Cluster analysis is an unsupervised machine learning technique that groups unlabeled data points into clusters. The goal is to categorize data points so that objects within the same cluster are as similar as possible, while objects in different clusters are as dissimilar as possible. There are several different clustering algorithms, including partitioning methods like k-means that iteratively assign data points to clusters based on centroid distances until cluster membership stabilizes. Clustering has many applications in fields like marketing, city planning, and earthquake studies.

Uploaded by

Irum Fatima
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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What is Cluster Analysis?

• Cluster: a collection of data objects


– Similar to one another within the same cluster
– Dissimilar to the objects in other clusters
• Cluster analysis
– Grouping a set of data objects into clusters
• Clustering is unsupervised classification: no predefined
classes
• Typical applications
– As a stand-alone tool to get insight into data distribution
– As a preprocessing step for other algorithms
Examples of Clustering
Applications
• Marketing: Help marketers discover distinct groups in their customer
bases, and then use this knowledge to develop targeted marketing
programs
• Land use: Identification of areas of similar land use in an earth
observation database
• Insurance: Identifying groups of motor insurance policy holders with a
high average claim cost
• City-planning: Identifying groups of houses according to their house
type, value, and geographical location
• Earth-quake studies: Observed earth quake epicenters should be
clustered along continent faults
What Is Good Clustering?
• A good clustering method will produce high quality clusters with
– high intra-class similarity
– low inter-class similarity
• The quality of a clustering result depends on both the similarity
measure used by the method and its implementation.
• The quality of a clustering method is also measured by its ability to

discover some or all of the hidden patterns.


Requirements of Clustering in
Data Mining
• Scalability
• Ability to deal with different types of attributes
• Discovery of clusters with arbitrary shape
• Minimal requirements for domain knowledge to determine input
parameters
• Able to deal with noise and outliers
• Insensitive to order of input records
• High dimensionality
• Incorporation of user-specified constraints
• Interpretability and usability
Data Structures
• Data matrix  x11 ... x1f ... x1p 
 
– (two modes)  ... ... ... ... ... 
x ... xif ... xip 
 i1 
 ... ... ... ... ... 
x ... xnf ... xnp 
 n1 

 0 
 d(2,1) 
• Dissimilarity matrix  0 
 d(3,1) d ( 3,2) 0 
– (one mode)  
 : : : 
d ( n,1) d ( n,2) ... ... 0
Measure the Quality of
Clustering
• Dissimilarity/Similarity metric: Similarity is expressed in
terms of a distance function, which is typically metric:
d(i, j)
• There is a separate “quality” function that measures the
“goodness” of a cluster.
• The definitions of distance functions are usually very
different for interval-scaled, boolean, categorical, ordinal
and ratio variables.
• Weights should be associated with different variables
based on applications and data semantics.
• It is hard to define “similar enough” or “good enough”
– the answer is typically highly subjective.
Major Clustering
Approaches
• Partitioning algorithms: Construct various partitions and
then evaluate them by some criterion
• Hierarchy algorithms: Create a hierarchical decomposition
of the set of data (or objects) using some criterion
• Density-based: based on connectivity and density functions
• Grid-based: based on a multiple-level granularity structure
• Model-based: A model is hypothesized for each of the
clusters and the idea is to find the best fit of that model to
each other
Partitioning Algorithms: Basic
Concept
• Partitioning method: Construct a partition of a
database D of n objects into a set of k clusters
• Given a k, find a partition of k clusters that
optimizes the chosen partitioning criterion
– Global optimal: exhaustively enumerate all partitions
– Heuristic methods: k-means and k-medoids algorithms
– k-means (MacQueen’67): Each cluster is represented
by the center of the cluster
– k-medoids or PAM (Partition around medoids)
(Kaufman & Rousseeuw’87): Each cluster is
represented by one of the objects in the cluster
The K-Means Clustering Method

• Given k, the k-means algorithm is


implemented in four steps:
– Partition objects into k nonempty subsets
– Compute seed points as the centroids of the
clusters of the current partition (the centroid is the
center, i.e., mean point, of the cluster)
– Assign each object to the cluster with the nearest
seed point
– Go back to Step 2, stop when no more new
assignment

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