Applied Data Mining

CHAPTER 4

Clustering Analysis

4.1 Clustering Analysis

Clustering analysis is an important learning method which doesn’t need any

prior knowledge. Clustering is usually performed when no information is

available concerning the membership of data items to predefi ned classes. For

this reason, clustering is traditionally seen as part of unsupervised learning.

We nevertheless speak here of unsupervised clustering to distinguish it from

a more recent and less common approach that makes use of a small amount

of supervision to “guide” or “adjust” clustering. In this chapter, we focus

on discussing this unsupervised learning method. The aim of clustering ...