Data Mining For Business Intelligence: Concepts, Techniques, and Applications in Microsoft Office Excel® with XLMiner®, Second Edition

Chapter 14. Cluster Analysis

This chapter is about the popular unsupervised learning task of clustering, where the goal is to segment the data into a set of homogeneous clusters of observations for the purpose of generating insight. Clustering is used in a vast variety of business applications, from customized marketing to industry analysis. We describe two popular clustering approaches: hierarchical clustering and k-means clustering. In hierarchical clustering, observations are sequentially grouped to create clusters, based on distances between observations and distances between clusters. We describe how the algorithm works in terms of the clustering process and mention several common distance metrics used. Hierarchical clustering also produces a useful graphical display of the clustering process and results, called a dendrogram. We present dendrograms and illustrate their usefulness. k-means clustering is widely used in large dataset applications. In k-means clustering, observations are allocated to one of a prespecified set of clusters, according to their distance from each cluster. We describe the k-means clustering algorithm and its computational advantages. Finally, we present techniques that assist in generating insight from clustering results.

Introduction

Cluster analysis is used to form groups or clusters of similar records based on several measurements made on these records. The key idea is to characterize the clusters in ways that would be useful for the aims of the analysis. ...