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Objectives of Clustering

What is Objectives of Clustering?

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Abu Sufian
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5 views

Objectives of Clustering

What is Objectives of Clustering?

Uploaded by

Abu Sufian
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Objectives of Clustering

1. Getting Data

Objective: Gather the raw data needed for analysis.

 Data Sources:
o Internal Sources: Databases, transaction logs, customer records.
o External Sources: APIs, web scraping, third-party datasets.
o Generated Data: Surveys, experiments.
 Data Types:
o Structured Data: Tabular data, such as CSV files or databases.
o Unstructured Data: Text, images, audio.
o Semi-structured Data: JSON, XML.

Example: If you're clustering customers, you might gather data on purchase


history, website behavior, and demographic information from your company's
CRM system.

2. Cleaning Data

Objective: Ensure the data is free from errors and inconsistencies.

 Common Issues:
o Missing Data: Handle missing values by filling them with
mean/median values, using algorithms like K-Nearest Neighbors
(KNN), or simply removing the affected rows/columns.
o Duplicate Data: Remove duplicate entries to avoid skewing the
clustering results.
o Outliers: Detect and handle outliers that could distort cluster
formation, either by removing them or treating them separately.
 Data Cleaning Techniques:
o Imputation: Filling missing data with appropriate values.
o Normalization: Adjusting data to ensure consistency, such as
converting all dates to a single format.
o Filtering: Removing unnecessary columns or rows.

Example: You might find missing age data in customer profiles. This could be filled
with the median age of the customers or treated as a separate cluster.
3. Data Preprocessing

Objective: Prepare the data for the clustering algorithm by transforming it into a
suitable format.

 Normalization and Scaling:


o Normalization: Adjust values to a common scale without distorting
differences in the ranges of values.
o Standardization: Scale data to have a mean of 0 and a standard
deviation of 1, useful for algorithms like K-Means.
 Dimensionality Reduction:
o Techniques like Principal Component Analysis (PCA) reduce the
number of variables while retaining the most important information.
 Feature Engineering:
o Creating new features from existing data to enhance the clustering
process.
o Encoding Categorical Variables: Convert categories into numerical
values using methods like one-hot encoding.

Example: If your customer data includes income, it may vary widely. Normalizing
the income data ensures that customers with high incomes don't
disproportionately influence the clustering.

4. Data Visualization

Objective: Visualize the data to understand its structure and the results of the
clustering.

 Exploratory Visualization:
o Histograms and Box Plots: Used to understand the distribution of
individual features.
o Scatter Plots: Visualize relationships between two variables, helping
to identify potential clusters before applying any algorithm.
 Visualizing Clusters:
o 2D/3D Scatter Plots: After clustering, plot the clusters to visualize
how the data points have been grouped.
o Cluster Centroids: In K-Means, visualize the centroids to understand
the center of each cluster.
o Heatmaps: Show the correlation between features, which can help in
understanding the structure of the clusters.

Example: After clustering customers based on their purchasing behavior, you


could use a 2D scatter plot to visualize the clusters, where each point represents a
customer, and colors distinguish different clusters.

5. Clustering Process

Objective: Apply a clustering algorithm to group the data into meaningful


clusters.

 Choosing the Right Algorithm:


o K-Means: Simple and widely used for partitioning data into K
clusters.
o Hierarchical Clustering: Builds a tree of clusters, useful when the
number of clusters is not known beforehand.
o DBSCAN: Useful for finding arbitrarily shaped clusters and handling
noise/outliers.
 Running the Algorithm:
o Initialize the clustering process by choosing the appropriate
parameters (e.g., number of clusters for K-Means).
o Fit the model to the data, allowing it to group similar data points
together.
 Evaluating the Clusters:
o Silhouette Score: Measures how similar a data point is to its own
cluster compared to other clusters.
o Elbow Method: Used in K-Means to determine the optimal number
of clusters by plotting the sum of squared distances and looking for
an "elbow" point.

Example: Using K-Means to group customers into 3 clusters based on their


shopping habits, you could evaluate the clustering quality with a silhouette score.

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