Predictive Analytics and Data Mining

Chapter 7

Clustering

Abstract

Clustering is an unsupervised data mining technique where the records in a data set are organized into different logical groupings. The groupings are in such a way that records inside the same group are more similar than records outside the group. Clustering has a wide variety of applications ranging from market segmentation to customer segmentation, electoral grouping, web analytics, and outlier detection. Clustering is also used as a data compression technique and data preprocessing technique for supervised data mining tasks. Many different data mining approaches are available to cluster the data and are developed based on proximity between the records, density in the data set, or novel application of neural networks. ...