Clustering Analysis and Algorithms

Abstract

Clustering is the process of grouping a collection of objects (usually represented as points in a multidimensional space) into classes of similar objects. Cluster analysis is a very important tool in data analysis. It is a set of methodologies for automatic classification of a collection of patterns into clusters based on similarity. Intuitively, patterns within the same cluster are more similar to each other than patterns belonging to a different cluster. It is important to understand the difference between clustering (unsupervised classification) and supervised classification.