Learn Data Mining Through Excel: A Step-by-Step Approach for Understanding Machine Learning Methods

© Hong Zhou 2020

H. ZhouLearn Data Mining Through Excelhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5982-5_3

3. K-Means Clustering

Hong Zhou¹ 

(1)

University of Saint Joseph, West Hartford, CT, USA

 

Please download the sample Excel files from https://github.com/hhohho/Learn-Data-Mining-through-Excel. Double-click Chapter3-1a.xlsx to open it.

General Understanding

Unlike linear regression which is a predictive method, clustering is a classification method that categorizes subjects (data points) into different groups (clusters), each with a number of characteristic measurements. For example, a bank may want to categorize customers into different risk groups when considering lending loans to its customers. Such a categorizing process relies on the selected characteristics ...