Applied Unsupervised Learning with R

Chapter 1

Introduction to Clustering Methods

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

• Describe the uses of clustering
• Perform the k-means algorithm using built-in R libraries
• Perform the k-medoids algorithm using built-in R libraries
• Determine the optimum number of clusters

In this chapter, we will have a look at the concept of clustering and some basic clustering algorithms.

Introduction

The 21st century is the digital century, where every person on every rung of the economic ladder is using digital devices and producing data in digital format at an unprecedented rate. 90% of data generated in the last 10 years was generated in the last 2 years. This is an exponential rate of growth, where the amount of data ...