Data Clustering

Chapter 21

Alternative Clustering Analysis: A Review

James Bailey

The University of MelbourneMelbourne, [e-mail]

21.1 Introduction

Clustering is one of the most fundamental and important techniques in knowledge discovery and is used in a wide variety of fields, ranging from biomedicine and information retrieval to financial analysis and Web mining. Clustering analysis provides a way to automatically identify patterns and relationships in complex data, to form hypotheses about their structure, and to make predictions for subclasses of objects.

There exists a large variety of knowledge discovery workflows that rely on clustering. In its basic form, clustering analysis is used to explore a complex dataset, by automatically ...