Clustering
Clustering
where data points within each cluster are more similar to each other than to those in other
clusters. In data analysis, clustering is widely used for data segmentation, pattern recognition,
image processing, and customer segmentation.
1. **Hierarchical Clustering**
- **Definition**: Hierarchical clustering builds a hierarchy of clusters. It starts with each data
point as its own cluster and iteratively merges the closest clusters until all points are in a single
cluster or until a desired number of clusters is reached.
- **Types**:
- **Agglomerative (Bottom-Up)**: Each observation starts as its own cluster, and clusters are
merged iteratively based on their proximity until one cluster remains or a certain number of
clusters is achieved.
- **Divisive (Top-Down)**: Starts with a single cluster containing all observations and divides
clusters iteratively until each observation is in its own cluster.
- **Distance Measures**:
- Commonly used distance metrics include Euclidean distance, Manhattan distance, and
Cosine similarity.
- **Linkage Criteria**:
- **Single Linkage**: Distance between the closest points of two clusters.
- **Complete Linkage**: Distance between the farthest points of two clusters.
- **Average Linkage**: Average distance between all points of two clusters.
- **Advantages**:
- Does not require specifying the number of clusters in advance.
- Can capture nested clusters or subgroups within data.
- **Disadvantages**:
- Computationally expensive, especially for large datasets.
- Sensitive to noise and outliers.
- **Implementation in R**:
- The `hclust()` function in R is used for hierarchical clustering, and the `dendrogram` plot
can be used to visualize clusters.
2. **K-Means Clustering**
- **Definition**: K-means clustering is a partition-based technique that divides the data into K
clusters, where K is specified by the user. It minimizes the variance within each cluster by
iteratively updating cluster centroids.
- **Algorithm**:
1. Initialize K cluster centroids randomly.
2. Assign each data point to the nearest centroid.
3. Update the centroids by calculating the mean of all data points in each cluster.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until centroids stabilize or a maximum number of iterations is
reached.
- **Advantages**:
- Simple and easy to implement.
- Works well with large datasets.
- Computationally efficient and fast.
- **Disadvantages**:
- Requires the number of clusters (K) to be specified in advance.
- Sensitive to the initial position of centroids and can converge to local minima.
- Not suitable for non-spherical clusters or data with varying densities.
- **Implementation in R**:
- The `kmeans()` function in R is used for K-means clustering, and the `factoextra` package
helps visualize the clusters.
### Conclusion
Clustering is a versatile and essential technique in data analysis that helps reveal hidden
patterns and structures in data. Choosing the appropriate clustering method depends on the
dataset’s nature, including its dimensionality, distribution, and data type. In R, a variety of
packages such as `stats`, `cluster`, `factoextra`, and `stream` provide robust support for
clustering tasks, enabling effective data segmentation and insightful analysis.