scikit-learn : Machine Learning Simplified

Using KMeans to cluster data

Clustering is a very useful technique. Often, we need to divide and conquer when taking actions. Consider a list of potential customers for a business. A business might need to group customers into cohorts, and then departmentalize responsibilities for these cohorts. Clustering can help facilitate the clustering process.

KMeans is probably one of the most well-known clustering algorithms and, in a larger sense, one of the most well-known unsupervised learning techniques.

Getting ready

First, let's walk through some simple clustering, then we'll talk about how KMeans works:

>>> from sklearn.datasets import make_blobs
>>> blobs, classes = make_blobs(500, centers=3)

Also, since we'll be doing some plotting, import matplotlib ...