Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques, 3rd Edition

10.7 Summary

■ A cluster is a collection of data objects that are similar to one another within the same cluster and are dissimilar to the objects in other clusters. The process of grouping a set of physical or abstract objects into classes of similar objects is called clustering.

■ Cluster analysis has extensive applications, including business intelligence, image pattern recognition, Web search, biology, and security. Cluster analysis can be used as a standalone data mining tool to gain insight into the data distribution, or as a preprocessing step for other data mining algorithms operating on the detected clusters.

■ Clustering is a dynamic field of research in data mining. It is related to unsupervised learning in machine learning.

■ Clustering ...