Machine Learning in Java - Second Edition

Clustering

Clustering is a technique for grouping similar instances into clusters according to some distance measures. The main idea is to put instances that are similar (that is, close to each other) into the same cluster, while keeping the dissimilar points (that is, the ones further apart from each other) in different clusters. An example of how clusters might look like is shown in the following diagram:

The clustering algorithms follow two fundamentally different approaches. The first is a hierarchical or agglomerative approach that first considers each point as its own cluster, and then iteratively merges the most similar clusters together. ...