10.2 Partitioning Methods
The simplest and most fundamental version of cluster analysis is partitioning, which organizes the objects of a set into several exclusive groups or clusters. To keep the problem specification concise, we can assume that the number of clusters is given as background knowledge. This parameter is the starting point for partitioning methods.
Formally, given a data set, D, of n objects, and k, the number of clusters to form, a partitioning algorithm organizes the objects into k partitions (k ≤ n), where each partition represents a cluster. The clusters are formed to optimize an objective partitioning criterion, such as a dissimilarity function based on distance, so that the objects within a cluster are “similar” to one another ...
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